book excerptise:   a book unexamined is wasting trees

One Night at the Call Centre

Chetan Bhagat

Bhagat, Chetan;

One Night at the Call Centre

Black Swan, 2007, 318 pages

ISBN 0552773867, 9780552773867

topics: |  fiction | indian-english |


In 2004, Chetan Bhagat came to IIT for a lecture.  Five Point Someone had
just come out, and the large hall was full. 

The essence of what Bhagat said was that best-sellers must be planned.  One
has to see what plot will appeal to what audience, and work on making it
interesting to a large audieence.  Chetan has been trying to attract the
younger crowd - who are also the more English literate readers.  His novels
address the aspirations and motivations of these young readers, and make
little connection with the phoren literary critic.  

What makes a novel a best-seller

Bhagat said that in India, sales of 1000 for a novel is breakeven.  Most
novels sell about 2000 copies.  Five point Someone sold 50,000 in two months,
he said then; it went on to sell more than a million copies, a record for
English novels in India.

To make a novel a best-seller, Bhagat carefully mixes the ingredients. 

One factoid he mentioned was that Males think about sex every 11 seconds.

A deeper observation was that good stories must touch the darkest corners of
your heart. 

	- What makes you ashamed of yourself?
  	- What makes you angry?
  	- What makes you laugh?

It is important to share your own shortcomings - it will draw in the
listener.  The aim is to make my heart connect to your heart.

Also, Bhagat believes in giving his books an inspirational, positive slant. 
Certainly, One Night is no exception. 

Finally, it helps that prices are kept low.  In his 2004 talk, Bhagat was
proud that they were able to market Five Point at under Rs.100.  Even today,
the price is still very affordable at slightyly above a hundred rupees. 

The genesis of One Night at the Call Center


In the book he refers to this talk at IIT Kanpur; apparently it was on his
way to Delhi in the night train that he met a call-center employee, an
attractive woman who tells him the story after making him promise to write up
the tale...

The book hit a nerve.  India's millions of English-educated youth wanted
upbeat, inspirational stories that related to their lives.  

English education in India has spread far more in recent years than in
colonial times. 

An article in 2005 by the business columnist Sucheta Dalal said that among
two professionals with comparable background and experience, the one who was
able to speak English earned a salary as much as four to five times higher
than the other who did not speak English. 
BPOs and the economics of English

Consequently, parents work hard to get their children educated at elite
English-medium schools.  As of 2012, there were more than 20 million Indian
kids studying at such schools.  For the millions of such people, IITs remain
aspirational, since very few youth get to study there.  Many tens of
thousands more end up at the call-centers, where the pay is good, as this
book repeatedly underlines. 

When One Night # the call center came out - later in 2004 - it was an even
bigger success than five point someone.  As of 2013, it had sold 2.5
million copies [Southmayd 13].  In an extended analysis of the popular
"pulp fiction", the sociologist Stephanie Southmayd of U. Toronto, 
writing in Postcolonial Text (2013) 
describes how this novel's runaway success created a sub-genre of the
call-centre-lit, with books such as Once Upon a Timezone_ (Neelesh Misra,
2006), Piece of Cake (Swati Kaushal, 2004), and Brinda Narayan’s
Bangalore Calling (2011). 

But the book also appeals to other, less fluent speakers of English.  
In an interview, Bhagat makes the ambitious claim: 

	My competition is apps like Candy Crush or WhatsApp...  I don't see
	other writers as my competition at all. I want a share of people's
	minds. I have to wean them off YouTube, movies and apps. I have to
	make them interested in books. India Today 2014 aug

It is possible for Bhagat to make such claims because more than any other
single author, has energized English fiction readership in India.

Pride in being Indian

Another aspect of Bhagat's story is that being Indian should be a matter of
pride.   Despite our shortcomings today, we are on our way to build a great
nation.  Vroom, a character in One night (agent name Victor Mell), wants to
work in areas that will show India's potential to the world- he wants to 
"build roads, power plants, airports, phone networks, metro trains."  

Such sensitive souls are of course troubled when the foreign caller,
starting with a problem affecting the vacuum cleaner, goes on to say: 

	    'Tell me your name. You're some kid in India, ain't ya, boy?'
	    'Yes, sir. I am in India.'
	    'So what did you have to do to get this job? Degree in nuclear physics?'
	    'Sir, do you need help with your cleaner or not?'
	    'C'mon, son, answer me. I don't need your help. Yeah, I'll change the
dust bag.  What about you guys? When will you change your dusty country?' 58

Vroom has quite a fit after this. 

In connection with the neutralization of the colonial status of English
argued by Southmayd, it is interesting to note that an early version of the
book had a scene where the protagonist Shyam (Sam to American callers)
sees a group of new inductees being trained:

 	‘Remember,’ the instructor said to the class, ‘a thirty-five-year-old
 	American’s brain and IQ is the same as a ten-year-old Indian’s
 	brain. This will help you understand your clients… Americans are
 	dumb, just accept it…’ 

Interestingly, this passage was dropped in later versions, that were aimed
possibly at a more international readership. 

On the whole, the book is an easy read.  The story ends on too positive a
note with a false rumour being spread by the company's call center to boost
service calls - it is not clear how such backhanded tactics can be
inspirational.   

Why don't literary critics like the book?

The plot is completely over the top, with everyone ending up where they
wanted to be, in terms of their work and romance.  No wonder literary
critics have stayed away.  

It is more Horatio Alger than Aldous Huxley, but the characters are
believingly delineated, and the pages turn effortlessly.

Bhagat makes it clear that he has no ambition of writing a literary work -
he just wants his authorial voice to be heard.  And this he has achieved
more than any one else.



Excerpts

Bakshi was about thirty but looked forty and behaved as if he was fifty. 25

When girls call a guy 'teddy bear', they just menn he's a nice guy
but they'd never be attracted to him. Girls may say they like such
guys, but teddy bears never get to sleep with anyone. 30

'And anyway, it's the girl who always gets to choose. Men propose and women
accept or, as in many cases, reject it.' 
...
It's true. Girls go around rejecting men like it's their birthright.  They
have no idea how much it hurts us. 33

a family was led to the table adjacent to us. The family consisted of a young
married couple, their two little daughters and an old lady. The daughters
were twins, probably four years old. The entire family had morose faces and
no one said a word to each other. I wondered why they had bothered to go out
when they could be grumpy for free at home. 39

--Want to be Happy or Thin?-- 
   'Eat, stupid. Do you want to be happy or thin'?' I said, pushing her
plate back towards her.
   'Thin.' 40

    We stood up to leave and the grumpy family's voices reached us.
    'What to do? Since the day this woman came to our house, our
family's fortunes bave been ruined,' the·old woman was saying.
    The daughter-in-law had tears in her eyes. She hadn't touched her
food while the man was eating nonchalantly.
   'Look at her now, sitting I here with a stiff face. Go, go to hell now.
Not only did you not bring anything, now you have dumped these two girls like
two curses on me,' the mother-in-law said. 41

According to Priyanka, a door-bitch is the hostess who stands outside the
disco. She screens every girl walking in, and if your waist is more than
twenty-four inches, or if you were not wearing something right out of an item
number, the door-bitch will raise an eyebrow at you like you are a
fifty-year-old aunty. 47

Sixteen breaths a minute

    Guys can never figure out what to say in such emotional moments and
always end up saying something stupid.
    'Your mother is crazy .. .'
    'Don't say anything about my mother. I love her. Can you just listen to
me for five minutes?' Priyanka said.
    I swore to myself to stay quiet for the next five minutes. I started
counting my breath to pass time. Sixteen a minute is my average; eighty
breaths would mean I had listened to her for five minutes. 51

    P: 'My mum and I were best friends once - until class eight I think. 
Then as I became older, she became crazier.'
    I wondered if I should point out that she had just told me not to call
her mum crazy. However, I had promised myself I would keep quiet.
    'She had different rules for me and my brother.  She would comment on
everything I wore, everywhere I went, whereas my brother ... she would never
say anything to him... 51

   'Bio?' Priyanka said to Esha. It was their code word for a visit to
the toilet together for a private conversation.

    'Tell me your name. You're some kid in India, ain't ya, boy?'
    'Yes, sir. I am in India.'
    'So what did you have to do to get this job? Degree in nuclear physics?'
    'Sir, do you need help with your cleaner or not?'
    'C'mon, son, answer me. I don't need your help. Yeah, I'll change the
dust bag.  What about you guys? When will you change your dusty country?' 58

    'Don't even make me happy just by chance,' Priyanka's mother said. 65

    We had a basic hug without really touching. A kiss was out of the
question. 70 [Priyanka near-breakup]

    'Thanks for listening to me,' Esha said. Only women think there is
a reason to thank people when someone listens to them. 76

    India has a billion people, but at night, 99 per cent of tbem are fasr
asleep. Then this land belongs to a chosen few: truck drivers, late-shift
workers, doctors, hotel staff and call-centre agents. We, the nocturnals
temporarily rule the roads and the country. 91

    Turning to the boy, she said. ‘Three strips of Fluoxetine, and five strips
each of Sertraline and Paroxetine. 92  
[these are versions of prozac and similar drugs; the boy at the counter
initially wants to see a prescription] 

God's message to the group

Four things needed for success: 
    - a medium amount of intelligence, 
    - a bit of imagination
    - self-confidence
    - facing, suffering failure





Southmayd : India on the Line: Globalization, and the Literature of Outsourcing

Postcolonial Text, Vol 8, No 1 (2013)

Among the current glut of pulp fiction situated in the call-centre, Chetan
Bhagat’s best-selling One Night @ the Call Centre (2004) is, in addition to
being the first work of call-centre lit, still probably the most popular book
in the genre, with over 2.5 million copies of the novel sold. Since
publishing One Night, the former investment banker is now widely considered
to be the most read living Indian author (McCrum). Bhagat can
also be credited for the runaway success of the call-centre-lit genre. As one
commenter on the Indian popular culture blog Jabberwock complained, “stories
concerning youngsters used to be about school, gangs or some other social ill
that the media had glommed onto . . . Now every god-dammity-damn indian [sic]
story has to involve a call[-]center in some form or fashion” (Singh,
“End”). Indeed, the publication of One Night by Indian publisher Rupa &
Co. has spurred a number of imitators among the multinational
English-language publishing houses—Hachette, Penguin, and HarperCollins—which
have a base in India and are eager to cash in on the call-center-lit trend,
thereby accessing a pool of readers estimated to become the largest in the
world within the next decade (Burke).

A love-hate relationship with outsourcing

One Night @ the Call Centre is at once a romantic comedy, a self-help book
with spiritual undertones, and a motivational management guide that critiques
positive neoliberal narratives around globalization and capitalism just as it
champions them with nationalist rhetoric. The main story, which in the
framing narrative is told by a mysterious woman to Bhagat, relates
(unsurprisingly) to one night in the lives of six call-centre
employees. During the night they field phone calls from Americans, who are
always represented as either racist or deeply stupid, squabble with each
other and, finally, receive a revelatory phone call from God. With the
intervention of the God character, the unhappy call-centre workers are able
to achieve personal and professional success and ultimately save their
call-centre—with which they have a love-hate relationship—from being
closed. The novel’s combination of social critique, suspense, romance and
humour have made it a hit—within three days of the book’s release, its
initial print run of 50,000 copies had sold out (Banerjee 288).

One Night’s simple and readable form of English may have also worked to
increase its sales to readers. Although in 2004 only approximately one-third
of the Indian population could speak English, a proficiency in the language
is increasingly being perceived as integral to achieving some measure of
success in the country. 

This “linguistic apartheid” (89), as Tina Basi calls it, begins early:
from a young age, children of the middle and upper classes almost invariably
receive an education in English; in fact, higher education is almost
impossible to receive without a preliminary knowledge of the language
(Chopra, qtd. in Nadeem 249, note 43). Probal Dasgupta writes that India is
caught in a diglossic situation in which English is seen as the most
prestigious of the languages spoken in the country. 

What is pulp fiction?

In his study of Indo-Anglian popular fiction, Tabish Khair defines the
content of pulp writing as

	not necessarily bad literature, but [which] does not set out to be
	consciously “literary”; [it] may not be completely derivative, but it
	tends to follow generic “formulas”; [it] may not be read by millions,
	but it sets out to attract as many members of a linguistic community
	as possible; [it] does not have to have simple narratives, but it is
	fiction whose primary concern is the activity of narration. 
		Khair, Tabish. “Indian Pulp in English: A Preliminary
    		Overview from Dutt to De.” The Journal of Commonwealth
    		Literature 48.3 (2008): 43-59 

The novels that belong to the “call-center lit” genre typically fit both
sets of criteria: published exclusively in paperback form, they are often
relatively inexpensive; they bear cartoon covers in eye-catching primary
colours; their writing is typically straightforward, simple, and
“un-literary;” and, as we will see, they often share similar thematic
concerns.

...
`
The workers described in call-centre lit undergo a profound transition
within the call-centre, assuming a hybrid identity not quite “Indian” and
yet not “Western” — an identity we may only be able to describe, vaguely,
as “globalized”—which places them in a heterotopia of crisis.

[AM: I think the word "globalized" does not convey the right idea.  The
attempt is to discover a distinct Indian identity, albeit one that speaks
in English.  This identity is informed by global forces, but at least in
Bhagat, wishes to remain intensely Indian. ]
see also: http://www.indianruminations.com/featured-stories/the-emergence-of-a-new-indian-identity-in-chetan-bhagat-s-works-s-sivanandan-tamilnadu/



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This review by Amit Mukerjee was last updated on : 2015 May 11