Strange things happen…
…And they happen when you least expect them to. There are times when the world is looking so dark, so dull, that it is almost impossible to see the light at the end of the tunnel. As you walk in darkness, the road twists and turns and there are bumps and potholes, which tug you out of any daydreaming. The light is still not visible and the dreams have been lost to a mundane oblivion leaving you with an unguided path to follow. But then, like a gust of wind from a breach of hope, comes…
One Night At A Call Centre
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A Brief Background
It’s a common trend today, to see American companies open Call Centres in India. By doing this, the American companies save on their labour costs and position their Costumer Services Department in India, where hundreds of thousands of young people are employed. These people, called Call Centre Agents are specially trained to put on American accents and actually understand an average American costumer’s psyche.
What does India lose in the deal?
Answer: Thousands of young minds, which turn to an American alternative and prefer to work for a higher pay than invest on a higher education and still get paid less than what they earn at Call Centres. So India’s loss is a generation of thinkers who are made to answer calls and cater to foreign costumers while their own governments sits and twiddles their thumbs and is unable to create sufficient jobs which are not just robot-work for young thinkers.
The Characters – The People
For the six main characters of the book who work in a Call Centre, one night changed their lives. The six main characters symbolise People in general. Like them, each one of us has dreams and aspirations, some for us, and some for the loved ones around us. We have had experiences similar to theirs, we have had times of failures and victories like them and we have felt the pain of rejection or the bliss of being accepted just like these six very normal people described by Chetan Bhagat.
Shyam Mehra
A Call Centre agent by profession, a narrator (to us) by force and an under-achiever by nature, Shyam’s biggest problem in life is his blood-sucking parasite of a boss called Bakshi, who stands in the way of any success that he could ever possess! His other problem is that he cannot deal with having to look at his ex-girlfriend in her face and remembering his good and bad times with her and quite often lapses into memory flashbacks.
Varun Malhotra aka Vroom
He loves anything on wheels! Speed is his spice and automobiles are his passion! He is the quintessential aggressive yet disillusioned youth of India who chose the Call Centre job to be able to maintain the lifestyle he had before his father left his mother and him. A slender good-looker, Vroom represents the confused generation of the country, which is not sure which path to choose, the one with more money or the other with more satisfaction.
Priyanka Sinha
Shyam’s ex-girlfriend, she’s a girl who’s all for roadside dhabas yet somewhere deep down doesn’t mind being in a “settled” environment either. Her tiffs (more like exaggerated soapy melodramas with bucket fulls of tears) are mostly caused due to the difference in thinking, and to a certain extent a generation gap, with the mother thinking that her daughter is aloof and doesn’t care for her anymore. Priyanka’s standing at crossroads, where one path leads to where she thinks she wanted to go, and the other where she thinks she’ll be happy, and she cannot seem to decide which to choose.
Esha Singh
An aspiring and struggling model, who’s sole aim to get an entrance into the glamour field. Against her parents’ wishes, she lives in Delhi and works at the Call Centre to support herself while during the day struggles to get modelling assignments. Esha represents those thousands of struggling artists who have big dreams for themselves, but are hit with the realities of the apparently alluring field when they are faced with the dark side of the business.
Radhika Jha
Recently married to the guy she loved, Radhika is at the initial stages of dealing with the problems of newly married family life. From a trendy young and independent girl, she now remains an obedient daughter-in-law and a lawful housewife, who works at night to help the financial situation of her family.
Military Uncle
A flat character throughout, who is a fifty-plus retired from the army man, who’s only detail known is that he used to live with his son and daughter-in-law until he was told to leave. He now works at the Call Centre to support himself.
Some bits off the Iceberg- some lines from the text that emphasise the underlying issues explicitly yet subtly:
Everyone was speaking with an American accent and sounded different from how they had in the Qualis. I took a break to compile the called statistics of the previous day. I did not particularly like doing this, but Bakshi left me with little choice (speaker: Shyam)
“So how are the resources doing?” Bakshi said, swivelling on his chair. He never refers to us as people; we are all “resources”
’’An air-conditioned sweatshop is still a sweatshop. In fact, it is worse, because nobody sees the sweat. Nobody sees your brain getting rammed, ” Vroom said
The Author and Some related thoughts
Chetan Bhagat comes out with another piece of thought provoking literature. While his earlier work, Five Point Someone proved to be an incredibly popular contemporary piece especially among the youth, ON@TCC also comes out as an eye-catching fiction-based-on-reality story, which attracts readers from a grand spectrum of the society. Unlike FPS, the book does not only concentrate on the problems of college going IITians, but analyses issues at a much more deeper level. Bhagat attempts to emphasise the problems that the average middle-class youth has to face and is able to do that very well to a certain extent.
However, sometimes during the book it is easy to confuse the main issue and the attention swerves to possibly superficial issues that have been handled time and again in literature. There are some points in the narration which seem a bit hard to digest and the reader wonders whether the writer has gone a bit too far with the “imagination”. So, ON@TCC doesn’t come without its share of faults.
Last Words
One Night At A Call Centre did impress me and made me think about issues faced by the Indian youth, but unlike FPS it failed to really make me take these issues to heart.
PS: DO NOT MISS the Prologue and the Epilogue, as they are VERY essential to really enjoy the experience!
Comments and Brickbats eagerly Awaited!