“These people wanted to live different lives. We benefitted from the new aspirations that people absorbed from television in those years: suddenly young people wanted to work and have their own money. In the BPO industry, people found financial independence at a young age, and that completely transformed their lives. Especially in the case of women. This was one of the first places in the country to have a thriving evening scene for young, single people. And it was a very good scene as well, very different from Delhi, which is dominated by bureaucrats and family wealth. Go to a party in Gurgaon and you will find much more intelligence and much more humility. This is where the future comes from.”
• • •
At the beginning of our century, a young man arrived in Delhi. There were many like him, and he could have come from pretty much anywhere, but he came from Kolkata. His name was Siddhartha.
Siddhartha was one of the great numbers of middle-class youths who rattled around, frustrated, in so many Indian cities of that time. His upbringing was sheltered and conservative, and he failed in his attempts to join the ranks of hustling entrepreneurs who were taking over the trading economy in those years. The era of well-paid, life-long government employment, for which Siddhartha’s personality would have been well-suited, was long over, while his timidity and unexceptional academic record kept him far outside the circles of corporate executives — who provided the new image of middle-class achievement.
“We knew nothing about Delhi when we arrived. We just came with a bagful of clothes and we stayed in a tiny apartment that belonged to one of our friends. It was a Muslim area and we were Hindus, scared of anything unexpected. The streets were very dirty and full of cows. I had no job to come to but we had exhausted our options in Kolkata and we thought we might have better prospects here. People used to say in Kolkata that you can grow more in Delhi and Mumbai. And for middle-class people, Delhi is much more attractive than Mumbai. People who work prefer Delhi; people who act prefer Mumbai.”
Bold gestures did not come easily to Siddhartha but he was encouraged in this one by the fact that his younger brother had come to Delhi before him and got a job within a week simply by wandering around and asking in stores.
“That’s why I came here. But it’s not easy to find a job that matches your expectations. That’s something I didn’t realise. At that time my mother was an assistant in a clothes shop in Kolkata, my brother had got a job in a bookshop in Delhi, and I thought if I start working in another shop we won’t get anywhere. So I tried to get into a business. I went for an interview for a sales job that was advertised in the newspaper. I took a bus all the way across Delhi and got completely lost looking for the address. When I finally arrived I was drenched in sweat and they instantly rejected me. All the other candidates came on motorbikes and they had all the things you were supposed to have. I had nothing.
“After a while I didn’t know what to do and I was running out of savings. So I went to the Oberoi Hotel, which was hiring bellboys. They offered me 200 rupees per night, working from eleven at night to seven in the morning.
“The first night, I arrived and they asked me to put on this uniform. So I put it on but I felt very awkward. And after three or four hours of that job I thought, ‘This isn’t me.’ I hung up the uniform and left the hotel at three in the morning. I walked all the way home. Fifteen kilometres. And the whole way I was wondering what I would do. How was I going to survive if my ego was so important?”
At this point of desperation, Siddhartha had a chance meeting with a family acquaintance who gave him a job in his decorating firm. The work involved going from site to site checking on the progress of painters and carpenters, and the salary was Rs 2,500 [$52] per month.
Siddhartha hated this job. But it bought him time. Time enough for him to hear a phrase he had never heard before: ‘business process outsourcing’.
“By the term ‘BPO’ I understood ‘call centre’ — I didn’t know that companies outsourced many functions other than customer service. So I wanted to work in a call centre. I spoke English fluently, but when I interviewed with the international call centres they said, ‘Your accent is too strong.’ So then I looked for Indian call centres and I got a job with Tata Indicom. The shift lasted from eleven at night to eight in the morning. They would pick us up in a bus and take us to the call centre. Customers would call with problems — their text messages weren’t working, their calls were cutting out — and we would solve them. I volunteered for the night shift because the volume of calls during the day was almost impossible, and also, if I worked at night, I would have the whole day to look for other jobs. For months I hardly saw my brother because I got home when he was leaving for work and he got home just as I left.
“Working at night was interesting. We were all men on the night shift and half the callers were women who wanted to chat. Relationships would form: we started to recognise callers and to put their calls through to the person they wanted to speak to. You would hear people shouting across the room like this: ‘Hey Karthik, Mrs Santoshi wants you to call her back.’ ‘Oh yes. It’s her birthday today: I promised to call her.’ These calls couldn’t last long because everything was monitored. But some of these flirtations led to real relationships.
“There are disadvantages to working at night. The main one is that the manager never sees you. You are just head count. Just a number. All the people who worked in the day were being promoted and I decided I had to go and see the manager face to face. In corporations, unless you ask for things, you don’t get them.
“First they told me to come back after a few days. So I did. Then they said ‘We’re not offering you a promotion’. I said, ‘Why not? Here are the requirements you set for me and I have met them all.’ I don’t know what got in to me that day but I was very insistent. So he said ‘Either you work or you leave, but there will be no promotion.’ So I said, ‘I’ll leave then’. And I walked out.”
We are sitting in Siddhartha’s apartment. He lives in one of the housing complexes dubbed ‘DDA flats’ after the Delhi Development Authority which built them. Conceived in the 1950s, and modelled on apartment complexes in the Soviet Bloc, new clusters of DDA flats were built all over Delhi until the 1980s without significant change to their design. The quality, however, dropped off greatly in the latter years, as the DDA’s idealism evaporated: the early developments, such as the one we are in, still strike one as tranquil and well-made, while the ones built later are falling down.
For those middle-class families who migrated to the capital between the 1960s and 1980s — the teachers, academics and doctors, for instance, who staffed the capital’s great new institutions — DDA flats provided the quintessential domestic landscape. Their acres of yellow stippled walls, their banks of mailboxes, their grassy courtyards with flowers and children’s swings, their maze of staircases always labelled with the same mass-produced digits — many of them half painted over, now — are the backdrop to so many Delhi childhoods.
It is a weekend afternoon, and we are sitting in front of the living room window which overlooks the garden where a gardener is watering rows of potted plants. Siddhartha’s mother is preparing lunch in the kitchen. His brother is watching cricket.
“Afterwards I realised what a huge blunder I’d made. I was right back where I’d started. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t go back to them and say, ‘Sorry I didn’t mean it.’ So I started trying to get another job. It was really difficult. I was sitting at home all day and pretending to my mother in Kolkata that I was going to work, since I hadn’t told her what had happened.”