Bestselling Indian author paints grim view of outsourcing jobs

Shyam Mehra, 26, hates it when the Americans call him Sam. He hates it even more when his boss calls him Sam too.

That's not all. He hates his work, his "semi-girlfriend" ... and himself.

Mehra is one of the American-hating characters from a new book that has struck a chord with India's fast-growing middle class.

....

English-speaking young people like Mehra form the backbone of India's rapidly expanding outsourcing industry which adds 17 billion dollars to the economy and employs 700,000 people.

And just like the country's outsourcing services, which are much in demand, "One Night at the Call Center" by Chetan Bhagat is flying off the shelves.

....

Meanwhile, an instructor preparing trainees for the job scribbles a golden rule on the blackboard for handling difficult customers: 10=35.

"Remember, a thirty-five-year-old American's brain and IQ is the same as a 10-year-old Indian's brain ... Americans are dumb, just accept it. I don't want anyone losing their cool during the calls..." the instructor tells a class.

....

The author, who works for Deutsche Bank, says that the country needs to create better infrastructure which can also generate productive employment, rather than providing stop-gap arrangements like outsourcing which can only bring in temporary economic growth.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051229/ennew_afp/afpentertainmentliteratureindiaoutsourcing

going belly up, and our nation becomes a fascist state under * and his band of thugs running thier war in Iraq?

Who cares what the East Indians think while they steal
our jobs anyway?

If the Indians dont like it, tough stuff. They can build thier little Wall with someone elses' money!

This is what they call "news" these day?

They are being hired for pennys on the dollar to do them. Those jobs will go away when the US economy collapses.

That's cute.

I love how Americans believe these jobs are inherantly theirs. I think it's your kind of arrogance and sense of entitlement that disgusts most of the world.

speak for the whole world, do you?

amuses me.

These are multinational companies that have no loyalty to this nation and to have thought otherwise shows incredible naivety. And I meant exactly what I said regarding Americans and a sense of entitlement.

Indians and Mexicans and Chinese and other brown folk aren't 'stealing our jobs' by any means. They are taking jobs that are going over there. If anyone is dumb, it's us, for letting 'our' corporations export these jobs.

If a Japanese company were coming here and offering decent pay (relative of course), would you refuse to take it? Would you really care if that job displaced a worker in that company's 'home' country?

I personally wouldn't. And I doubt most would if it offered them a better life.

I'm not condemning your frustration. Hey, I just graduated with a degree in engineering and am looking for a job. But I know that my frustration isn't going to be targetted at someone in India or China. It's going to be targetted at the company that took the jobs there - and even moreso at the politicans that allowed this to happen with absolutely no penalty.

A more active thread. http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x5714505

Would this be racist, xenophobic, or both?

And based on greed. Any xenophobia, et al, is indirect and a byproduct of the ambient greed. Anything to 'stir up the team". And pissing on Americans only helps achieve that.

Many might argue that we exported that greed in some ways with our materialistic lifestyle. I wouldn't necessarily agree, but having worked in retail, this kind of looking down on the customer thing is ingrained.

Here it materalizes in disliking Americans because the customers are primarily American. Hey, usually it's Americans that go and set those damn call centers up in the first place...or sent them there.

While I believe it is arrogant in calling us dumb, at times it does make sense. We sent those damn jobs there in the first place. Now we whine. We shouldn't have elected corporate ass kissing politicians (of both parties) that allowed this to happen without any penalties. That and to most of the world, we actually elected Bush twice to office. That doesn't improve our image in any way - especially intellectually!

Over 100,000 copies sold. :wow: With so many East Indians that have the IQ of a 35 year old American at only 10 years old you'd think he'd be selling millions of books! 5,000 copies of a book sold ensures one a spot on the "best seller" list in India. :eyes: Now tell me, WHO has the higher IQ again? :rofl: Nice try, "Sam".

thinks we elected Bush.

And if that's the case, I think they have the right to think of this country as dumb.

Forest Gump, thats our boy, chimpy!

Bush may have the IQ of Gump, but he's a spiteful, psychotic bastard.

:D

100,000 copies sold in a land of how many millions? (It's anywhere between 800 million and one BILLION.)

Or how much does this book cost? Can only 100,000 people afford it? :7 Doesn't make their economy seem so great if that's the case...

If "Sham" is a #1 author... then I'm better than Wilt Chamberlain and I screwed over 6,000 women in bed.

Destroy one middle class to buoy another. Work over-qualified new members (remember, many of these people working call centers have MBAs) of Indian middle class to a mundane and mind-numbing existence, much like our middle class was/is being driven to. Republican-owned media champions this practice like it's the greatest thing to happen to the world since television, the printing press and Marco Polo. In reality, the price on everything here has STILL not decreased as a result, unlike the tax burden of the uber-wealthy. What DOES end up increasing is the rich/poor income gap and the upper 95% income earner's pay . . . every SINGLE YEAR.

It's amazing that there are actually DUers that think offshoring is a GOOD thing. It's a completely vomitous Repuke-plutocratic practice that only makes kings of the wealthy of both nations involved while the middle classes in both nations continue to be beaten into lobotomy and the middle class here lose all technological gain and jobs that were the keys of breaking into corporate America in the first place.

For the people who work these call centers work at night, making it harder to be with family, etc. And the people who work these call centers are in cities, often far away from the village where they came from. That many are disillusioned by the work and the emptiness of materialsim is no surprise. Psychologically, they are taking out their frustrations on the Americans they provide service to.

Yeah, right.

One of my neighbors is an Indian immigrant & keeps up on political issues there.

According to him, as wages and the standard of living have went up in India, big corporations are starting to think that labor costs even there are getting too expensive. Apparently they are outsourcing from India to places with even cheaper labor like Indonesia, Bangladesh, etc.

Once the resources in one place have been milked to their potential (in this case, enough to where these rich bastards may actually have to start (shudder) SHARING their wealth), ONWARD to the next cheapest nation, until they come to one who'll do the work for close to FREE.

Nixing US workers is a symptom to their problem.

And to whine that $3/hr is too much really shows how depraved those executives are. I wish their jobs could be offshored, then they would know what it's like... ('suffer the death of thy neighbor'; if those in power remembered that quote from the Bible, our history would have been far less bloody and far more a perfect union...)

It'd be a real boon for shareholder profits too... all that extra money going to THEM instead of the twit at the top of the totem-pole.

to the Philippines, China, and less expensive places.

As I stated, these companies have no loyalty to any country. The execs and shareholders are only concerned about short term profit.

Like I've said before, offshoring does not help US National Security or its interests. Or our economy, which is of interest to the whole damn world. News agencies recently reported a terrorist incident in India. This is not because terrorists are blindly hacking away at the western world. It's because India has one thing that terrorists despise: "America". And they finally figured out that if they can't make it to America, to stick in their own land and fight America there. And thanks to Bush, there are far more terrorists now than ever.

Of course, it's not good for the people of India either - corporate leeches aside, there are plenty of innocent Indians who are now defenseless targets for terrorists to kill. Solely because they're in America's back pocket... at least until they become expendable, much how US citizens now are.

Americans are not dumb. That's an excuse they make when offshoring. (the only sad part is how many people blindly believe it, without looking at the facts...)

Until then, poor old Sam will have to lump it. I can't believe he's letting an epithet worry him so. (hell, I'm amazed nobody calls him "sham", which is more appropriate - being a call center support person myself, we're all victim to angry, anxious, frustrated, and/or rude customers. If he can't handle that, he can go back to whatever he had done before.) One would think Sam would be more interested in the lives of himself and his friends and family. Apparently name-calling hurts him more, how much more vain can a person get?! (So it seems not just Americans are dumb... Sammy-poo is acting like a 10 year old too... actually, not quite. Try 7 years old.)

Indeed, who the fuck came up with the bulk of today's modern equipment? Computers, cars, electronics, et cetera? Americans. We, the people of middle class, are simply no longer cost-effective. So when they speak of 'globalization', ask them why prices for goods in America are hog-hellishly high compared to prices for goods in all those other countries. Until everything is equal, "globalization" is a myth. A LIE. It's as simple as that.

And anyone supporting offshoring had better put me on 'ignore' if they can't convince me as to how it's a good thing. Because, looking at the big picture, it is anything but good.

And until America shows it's got an infrastructure, I don't blame people from not enrolling in IT or science-related classes. Offshoring is seen as a boon and there is no end in sight. People in favor if it are making claims that only low-end jobs are being offshored. That is less than the total truth; and to offshore even ONE job hurts at least ONE American life. If not our economy AND national security to boot.

As Lenin said, "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." America has trumpeted the joys of the "free market" to the rest of the world. And, they have taken the advice and are turning it against us with the help of out own "patriotic" capitalists.

The irony is delicious.