Okay, so I finished Chetan Bhagat's one night @ the call center. SPOILER: The story is told our narrator by a woman in an overnight train who turns out to be ... the goddess (she's reading a holy text in English translation!) who calls the protagonists at a crisis moment in their lives and helps them achieve their dreams. Nothing more ambitious than that! So two poeple quit their jobs at the call center and start a software company, one quits her cheating husband and another dumps her arranged fiance for the somewhat schlubby narrator, who rediscovers his self-confidence.
The only more than personal dream achieved is to save their call center from being closed down. To do that they - nudged by the goddess - initiate hysteria in the US by calling Americans during Thanksgiving dinner (they know their names, computer model, etc.) and telling them their computers have been infiltrated by a terrorist virus! However, this call center is on it. Lucky for them it's full of Indians, all of whom are geniuses at computers, so everything will be okay so long as they keep calling every 6 hours. This massively increases call volume, which tricks their American bosses into canceling the planned "right sizing of resources" (i.e., terminations).
It's very funny, and captures the weirdness of the flat world and the young people drawn into it - but I'd like to think that the author made up the introductory lecture for new call center recruits which is called "35 = 10" and explains that Americans 35 years olds are like 10-year old children in India, and need their hands held and to be treated with endless patience. Are we the only sort of people who'd take out the lining of our oven in order to make space for an oversized turkey and then wonder why dinner was messed up? Are other peoples really so different when they call a help line with their problems?
Of course, 35 = 10 doesn't even begin to describe the difference between India, which has generated and drawn and mingled civilizations for thousands of years, and America, with its two hundred years and counting. All proportion is lost when you try to wrap your mind around it.
I suppose one way in which I'm but a 10-year-old is in resenting the need to bargain for everything here. Wouldn't all be better served (and not just spectacularly lousy bargainers like me) by clearly marked prices to which sellers and buyers were committed? But as I think about it the issue seems deeper, far deeper. What I desire in my 10-year-old way is the assurance that the price I'm paying is fair - something one can only dream of as a tourist in India where small change to me translates to big bucks to most Indians. There's no proportion. But is it really any different back home, where all prices (except cars) are fixed?
In the book I describe what I call the market theodicy, the belief that a free market allocates goods justly (and indeed spreads the most to the most), and so that social inequality is not a problem. I think it's the dominant neoliberal theodicy, and the backdrop to American life. But here I find myself caught up in it, and seeing in a new way its specious promise. By reducing one's experience of the economic system to discrete moments of regulated exchange - which seem to us fair and square, since we're paying the listed price (if we can afford it) - the broader arbitrariness of the distribution of resources vanishes from view. Not here it doesn't, and I don't think this is just for the foreigner suddenly stricken with wealth. How does the 35-year-old Indian (or older) cope with all this?
