Three

I drive past a billboard advertising a television business channel. It shows the radiant face of a businesswoman and the caption, “1 hour of viewing can impact your bottomline”.

Since the photo ends at the woman’s neckline and we cannot see her “bottomline”, I assume the text is supposed to read “bottom line”. But she does look very smug about something.

“The first people we interviewed declined the jobs we offered them because they thought we were loony to imagine we could work for international corporations out of India. They all thought Indian standards were too low.”

I am sitting in the office of Raman Roy,* CEO of Quatrro, a business process outsourcing company. Raman has little round glasses and wears an informal checked shirt. In his early fifties, he has an avuncular, and strikingly egalitarian, manner.

“There were so many disbelievers,” he continues. “They didn’t believe that we were capable of that quality. They had a fundamental problem imagining that an Indian could do a white man’s job. We still look up to white skin in this country.”

But as things turned out, it could be quite the reverse.

“Sometimes our employees had to apologise for doing a better job than the people who taught them. That has changed how they think. They realise they don’t have to feel they’re inferior to anyone.”

The opening of Nehru’s Independence speech, one of the most quoted passages of all twentieth-century rhetoric, contains a glaring error.

When it is midnight in India “the world” does not sleep. When it is midnight in India it is tea time in London and cappuccino time in San Francisco. And, as it turned out after 1991, there were billions of dollars to be made from this rudimentary geographical fact.

If there was one commercial development that became iconic for the new, globalised India, it was ‘business process outsourcing’ (BPO). The idea was that, given the state of contemporary telecommunications, a company’s various functions did not all have to be grouped in one place. They could now be distributed throughout global space with no loss to functionality. Enormous cost savings could be achieved by moving non-core activities to lower-wage locations. Though this redistribution had already begun elsewhere in the world, it was the entrepreneurs of post-liberalisation India, above all, who turned the theory into a world-changing reality. And one of these entrepreneurs was Raman Roy.

At the moment of liberalisation, Raman was working for American Express, one of the foreign companies that had remained in India since British times. In the new climate of the 1990s, Raman helped convince his US bosses to consolidate the company’s Asia-Pacific accountancy work in Delhi, where costs were low, and educated English speakers plentiful.

Perhaps it is difficult to remember now just how unlikely this must have appeared at the time. India seemed remote and primitive to most Americans, and the idea of moving a significant chunk of an American financial giant there was unorthodox to say the least. But as with many eccentric ideas, this one helped the people concerned to see the world in a different way. Over time, American Express transferred more and more of their ‘back office’ operations to Delhi – and Raman realised that there was a hitherto unimagined kind of value locked up here.

By the middle of the 1990s, a number of immense forces were converging on this little experiment. In India, the lifting of restrictions on business and capital continued apace, and investment funds flowed in to fuel the resulting entrepreneurial frenzy. One group of companies that rose very quickly to prominence was the new IT firms, founded mostly in the south of the country. The most dazzling of these was Bangalore-based Infosys, which in 1999 was listed on Nasdaq, where its valuation a year later hit $30 billion. This ascendancy derived not simply from the fact that these companies were delivering software systems to global corporations at half the cost of their American counterparts. No: their Indian location allowed them to compress not just money but also, and just as importantly, time. Indian consultants worked alongside their US clients during the American day and then sent a brief to India, Indian software teams worked through their day – the US night – and American clients could view the results first thing in the morning. Two working days had been extracted from one. By the time Raman Roy was thinking about cutting up American corporations and placing their various functions in different parts of the world, he could see several other people in India who were trying to bend the world in similar ways.

It is no coincidence that such thinking arose in a formerly closed and state-controlled economy. The entrepreneurs who emerged from that environment were full of revolutionary zeal, and took great pleasure in erasing the national boundaries that had hemmed in their childhoods – to an extent, in fact, that unnerved many of the Americans and Europeans who subsequently found much of their lives administered from the other side of the world. These entrepreneurs were intelligent iconoclasts who believed in technology and corporations, and hoped to use the power thereof to overturn nearly everything of the India that had existed before 1991. And yet they were Indian, and when they looked at the world of American business they did so with a foreign, unaccustomed eye. “How is it they have never thought of doing it like this?” they said to themselves, and went on to change things.

Perhaps it helped that they came from a land where trading families had for centuries spread their members out to different places on the planet in order to spot the commercial gradients between them. When one talks to members of these families, even those who are highly parochial in their personal habits – arranging only intra-caste marriages for their children, for instance – one often discovers an astonishing indifference to location and distance. It is precisely the regimented nature of their family structures, in fact, that frees them to such a flexible and unsentimental relationship to place. There are no facts except cost and revenue, and if the latter exceeds the former then the deal is good, no matter how bizarre the geographical effects.

Not entirely coincidentally, this Indian form of globalism was unleashed just at the moment when it could merge with another major transformation in the global economy. American corporations had spent the previous decade moving manual work overseas, both as a cost-reduction exercise and as a political assault on American workers, who enjoyed more bargaining power than the far-flung characters who increasingly laboured in their stead. This idea of the globally dispersed, low-friction corporation had a heroic appeal to American – and many European – boardrooms of the time and, as new communications technologies began to erode the information distance between one place and any other, it was natural for them to ask if there were other, non-manual, functions that could be moved overseas, with similar financial and political gains. Since many of these functions demanded large numbers of English speakers, India, with its much lower cost base, was an obvious place to look to. Using Indian, instead of American, software developers showed that the idea had great potential, and the stage was set for American corporations to start breaking off parts of their own internal operations and sending them in the same direction.

The other factor in the emergence of Indian business process outsourcing was the existence, just outside India’s capital city, of an enormous zone of high-tech real estate where all these chunks could land. This was the new suburb of Gurgaon. DLF, the real-estate company behind the development, had been slowly buying up plots of farmland to the south-west of Delhi since the early 1980s. When the restrictions on foreign companies coming into India were lifted, this territory revealed a value beyond imagination. Gurgaon supplied the essential infrastructure to a major realignment of global corporate forces. Bordering Delhi in the neighbouring state of Haryana, it was conveniently close to the capital’s international airport and was far preferable to corporations than anywhere in Uttar Pradesh, the other neighbouring state, which was known for its criminal activity. By the end of the 1990s, corporations were setting up there in droves, many of them moving out of the land-choked corporate capital, Mumbai, to do so.

The trigger for this incredible rush to the Haryana brushland had come with the announcement by General Electric, the world’s seventh-largest corporation, that it would set up a new operation in Gurgaon. Named GE Capital International Services, the new entity would run global back-office operations for GE Capital, GE’s finance company. In 1996, Raman Roy got a call asking if he would be interested in further developing his experiments at American Express at ‘GECIS’. He went to Delhi’s Oberoi Hotel to discuss the prospect with the president and CEO of GE Capital, Gary Wendt.

In an era of dazzling corporate energies, Wendt was a prime mover who understood the radical opportunities associated with global deregulation. At the beginning of his command, GE Capital had no operations outside the United States: by the time he came to Delhi it was spread over forty-five countries. Under Wendt, financial services had become the largest and most profitable part of the General Electric group, overtaking every other division of what was, in its origins, a manufacturing company. He had achieved this in part because he was an operational genius who understood how costs and revenues could be entirely restructured in the global era.

“That guy was a maverick,” says Raman. “He was so quick to realise the potential of what we’d done at American Express. He asked me, ‘What do you think we’ll lose if this thing doesn’t work?’ I added 3 million to the number we’d already talked about and said ‘$10 million.’ ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘That’s loose change. I’m going to put the money into an account for you and nobody will ask you how you spent it. Just set up something like you did at American Express.’ Without him it never would have happened. I would never have got approvals for the enormous money I paid for satellite dishes and everything else.”⁵

Raman had been working at the rock face of outsourcing for a decade when he arrived at GECIS and he had a more detailed conception than his American bosses of where this line of enquiry could go. In 1998, he set up a makeshift experiment in the Gurgaon office. It was India’s first international call centre. Sitting in that office, workers handled credit card customer service calls from the United States. His fellow board members at GE in India had expressly forbidden him to pursue this experiment, so he concealed it from them and invited Gary Wendt to come and have a look.

“It was modelled on one of those old hairdressing shops. I rigged up curtains to separate the workers. If my colleagues had seen what I was doing I would have been fired. There was sensitive information on the screens and the whole thing was very ramshackle. I had no budgets – I started with just twenty people.

“When Gary Wendt came to visit he looked at this hairdressing shop and he was stunned. I can still see him coming down the stairs and shaking his head. He said, ‘I don’t think you understand what a revolution you’ve started’. He went away and became an evangelist for it in GE. Our cost per unit was less than 50 per cent of the existing and our quality was higher. In the US they were employing school drop-outs; we were employing people with college degrees. Before long we were providing services not just to GE Capital but to the whole General Electric group.

“It required massive lobbying to get to that point. International telecommunications were still a government monopoly, and the government was suspicious. When I went to ask for international bandwidth for that first hairdressing shop they thought I must be involved in espionage, because no one had ever requested that much capacity before. And though it was possible to rent a private international line, it was illegal to connect it to any public network, which would bypass the government monopoly – the fine was something like $150,000 per day. It took us eight months to get an exemption from that, and even then they only gave us permission for a pilot. They didn’t comprehend what we were doing. We had to print out definitions of call centres from the internet and show them to government officials so they would understand what we were trying to do.”

Raman is one of those people who have the satisfaction of seeing their own quiet realisation becoming a global revolution. “The original ambition,” he says, “our ultimate horizon for this, stretched to about a thousand people. But it grew far beyond that. It became hundreds of thousands of people and it changed the whole society.” Before long the rush for these jobs was such that the company was forced to alert the police whenever they were holding interviews, so great were the crowds outside the office. People came from far away with their whole families, and they would sit outside the office for days. The company had to hand out food and water.

GECIS delivered a wide range of services to General Electric companies. Customer service phone calls were only a small part of the corporate functions transferred to India, which became increasingly more complex and specialised as time went on. Systems and training were developed to a high level of effectiveness, and Indian workers did not have only mindless and repetitive tasks to fulfil: many of them went to the US for briefings and became valued employees of the global organisation.

After a while Raman began to feel that a much greater opportunity was being missed. “It was great to have the trappings of corporate life, big cars and clubs and everything, but I saw the possibility of doing something much bigger. I told GE that the real opportunity was to provide outsourced services to other corporations but they wanted to keep it for themselves. So in 2000 I set up Spectramind, which provided these services to all the big corporations – Microsoft, Dell, HP, Cisco, AOL, American Express, Citibank. Within a few years GE followed suit. They sold GECIS and it became an independent company called Genpact providing outsourced services to all.”

Still headquartered in Gurgaon, Genpact is now, with annual revenues in excess of a billion dollars, as large as some of its Fortune 1000 clients. It has acquired other outsourcing companies in places as far-flung as Guatemala, China, Poland, South Africa and the Philippines, employs over fifty thousand people around the world and provides outsourced services in some thirty languages. It is so good at what it does that it has begun to make significant acquisitions in the United States. Because of its specialisation it can run non-core corporate functions more efficiently and to a higher level of quality than most corporations can do themselves. It has taken over substantial parts, for instance, of Walgreens’ accountancy, which it now operates as outsourced functions in America.

After Spectramind was acquired by Indian computer giant Wipro, Raman, still restless in big corporate culture, left to set up Quatrro. As wages rise in India and some of the more basic outsourced work is moved to other countries, Quatrro has looked further and further up the value chain. The several thousand people it employs to supply their expertise to the world’s companies include medical doctors, lawyers, engineers and journalists. And Quatrro targets a different market. “No one was servicing small and medium-sized American companies,” Raman says. “They need all kinds of services they don’t want to set up for themselves – from risk management to tax reporting. And there are a lot of them. The fees are much smaller: my average client only pays $5,000 a month. But I have 10,000 clients.”

Raman has presumably amassed a significant personal fortune, but that seems to be the least of his satisfactions. What excites him is change. He invests from his own wealth in the projects of younger entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurialism, he feels, is the world’s most powerful redeeming force.

“The BPO industry was catalytic. Nowadays, this industry earns about $15 billion in India. It employs 800,000 people, with an indirect employment of 4 million. And it’s no coincidence that people started writing novels and making films about those people because they were in many ways the vanguard of the new India. They were hard-working, technology-savvy and they were exposed to the global environment. They were part of a massive change.

“Until the 1990s there were so few opportunities that many people stayed in education and did an MA just to save face. To conceal the fact that they were basically unemployed. So when we set up GECIS we found a big educated population in Delhi waiting for us to absorb them. But we soon ran out of local people and had to look further afield. In those days, more than half of Gurgaon apartments were occupied by people who had migrated from smaller towns to work in our industry.

“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.”

Finally, Siddhartha saw an ad in the paper for a job fair. He went along and was invited to Gurgaon for an interview with GECIS.

“I had no idea how to go to Gurgaon back then. I left at six in the morning to make sure I got there by nine. And I got the job. My shift coincided with the US day which meant I worked from eight in the evening to four in the morning, processing all the insurance claims.

“I was very happy. I mean, we were all very elated. I was getting a monthly salary from a foreign corporation. Before that I was outsourced – I was not on the payrolls of Tata Indicom but of the call centre which serviced them. So one of the questions I asked in my interview with GE was whether I would be on the company’s payroll. And that was the start of everything.

“Soon after I started working with GECIS, GE sold its stake in the company and it was renamed Genpact. It was no longer part of GE and it could provide services to other companies as well. I began working on the business development team and we reached out to companies like Pfizer, Wachovia and Cadbury. Because we had been working for GE for so many years, it was easy to convince other global companies to send their back-end processes to Gurgaon.”

Siddhartha had his break. He was managing Genpact’s work for Pfizer, and he had a respectable income. His brother was also working for a call centre by now – and between them they were earning about $1,500 a month, of which they saved a half.

“My mother quit her job in Kolkata and came to stay with us. Before that, as two bachelors, we were compromising on a lot of things but when a female member of the family is around, you can’t do that. We moved into a better apartment. I went on business trips to Europe and America. The following year, I got a job with Barclays Bank. We bought a plot of land in Kolkata to build a house on. We moved into this place.”

Siddhartha is not without a sense of good fortune.

“Since globalisation, everything has changed for the middle classes. I saw the earlier generation in Kolkata – people who were in their thirties when I was a teenager – and they never used to get a job. They would graduate from college and then they all became private tutors. That was the only work they could get. Once in a while, someone used to get a corporate job and move away from Kolkata, and everyone used to talk about those people. They were the exceptions. But now, because of the BPO world, people get a job very easily. In that sense, young people’s lives have become very good.”

Siddhartha’s mother summons us to lunch. We go through to the dining room, where three places are laid out for the men. Siddhartha’s mother will serve us and eat later. We sit down in front of pots of steaming rice, chicken and daal.

“I tell him,” his mother says as she serves mountains of rice onto each plate, “that it’s time to get married. Now we are comfortable, it’s time to think about finding a wife! For ten years neither of them has done anything except work. They haven’t enjoyed themselves at all.”

Siddhartha says nothing. He waits for his mother to leave the room.

“For a long time I didn’t think about getting married because I didn’t want anyone to interfere with my work and my savings. But now I want to get married and I cannot. Arranged marriages are impossible for me because I can’t make a life-long decision about a woman based on an hour’s conversation. At the same time, all the women of my own age are already married. And I’m not a flamboyant person who knows how to go out and talk to young women.

“The people who are in their twenties now don’t know what the real India was. They live frivolously because they have never seen reality. They have never seen the hardship of life. People have stopped taking life seriously because they know they can easily get a job. I don’t enjoy talking to this generation. I find it more satisfying talking to older people, who have seen hardship. They talk more sense.”

Siddhartha harbours great ambivalence about the world that has provided him with his material basis. It seems full of moral threat to him, and the fact he is not married is just a part of the general, almost monastic, seclusion he maintains outside work. Though he has devoted all of the last decade’s energies to accessing the rewards of the new business machine, he has at the same time been anxious to keep its social and spiritual implications at bay. He never attends the many parties and outings organised by his youthful colleagues. After ten years in the capital, Siddhartha’s mistrust of its culture remains intact. He hopes one day to return to Kolkata and to live once more among people with values like his.

“I don’t see those values in Delhi. I would never marry a woman who comes into the office with her shoulders bare. A woman can be very attractive without baring herself. In Kolkata you hardly ever see women wearing clothes that are so revealing. What possible reason could there be for wearing such clothes? India has a culture. We are not America. India has a culture of its own but we are in danger of losing it because we don’t value anything anymore. Everything comes too easily now, and all people think about is spending money and having fun.”

Perhaps this is why, after ten years of living in Delhi, Siddhartha and his brother have hardly a possession to their name. This is a spectacularly empty apartment. A few folding chairs, a small television and an air cooler are pretty much the only additions they have made to the landlord’s basic furniture. There are battery-operated clocks on the walls of each room but nothing else. In the mother’s bedroom is a small shrine and a photograph of her dead husband. Clothes and personal effects are locked away in steel armoires. The few objects on the built-in bookshelf in the corner of the living room serve only to emphasise how large and empty it is. There is a small model of the Eiffel Tower and a propped-up set of coasters, which have never been taken out of their plastic box, showing the landmarks and boulevards of Paris. There is a statue of Ganesh, a plastic plant and five Bengali novels.

It feels as if they are living in permanent temporariness, acquiring nothing that might stand as an obstacle between them and their eventual retreat from this cultureless place.

“There has to be some culture which is inherited from our ancestors. Just take the example of these pubs. Indian culture has never been used to this. Now the young are going there and it’s become part of their lifestyle. So if they were managing with 20,000 rupees a month, now they need 30,000. I’m not saying you shouldn’t go to pubs but you must not lose yourself and your culture. Otherwise it will be a dog-eat-dog world.”

When, recently, I attended the celebration of Siddhartha’s arranged nuptials, it occurred to me that he has in one sense conspicuously preserved the culture of his ancestors. Siddhartha, in fact, is my cousin, and shares with me a long-dead Bengali grandfather with an almost neurotic admiration for the English language. The family’s facility with English persisted through the generations, and helped enable Siddhartha, so many decades later, to secure his job in a Delhi call centre.

* Real name.