But these are minor cavils. Luce clearly loves the country he writes about — an essential attribute for a book like this — but he is tough-minded, and his judgment is invariably sound. Luce quotes a colleague as telling him, “In India, things are never as good or as bad as they seem.” If you want to understand how that might be, read his wonderful book.
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As her subtitle suggests, and despite her Indian name, Mira Kamdar, whose mother was Danish, is an American writing for American readers. But her book is all the more interesting to Indians for that, because it helps answer an intriguing question: What does a sensitive, engaged American writer (“I wrote this book because I believe that India matters as never before to the future of a world in crisis”) feel her compatriots need to know about India? Planet India is a thoroughly researched depiction, warts and all, of today's India. Kamdar has visited the country frequently since her childhood and sprinkles her narrative with personal anecdotes and references to her father's family there, but she has also put in a great deal of research, and her book bristles with statistics. She traveled extensively through the country in the course of a year, conducted wide-ranging interviews and conversations with an astonishing array of Indians, and has taken pains to cover all the key topics that a comprehensive examination of the country demands. It's all here — the IT boom, the television explosion, nuclear weapons, biotech research — and no booster of “India Shining” can have reason to complain: Kamdar even quotes a young NRI filmmaker in New York, Smriti Mundhra, saying, “Who needs the American audience? There are only three hundred million people here.” (What's the Hindi equivalent of chutzpah?)
But to Kamdar's credit, she doesn't stop with the good news. Planet India is also unsparing in its portrayal of rural poverty, fetid slums, throat-searing pollution, inadequate health care, crippling water shortages, cities choking on themselves. And as a writer of Gujarati descent, her own despair about the pogrom overseen by Narendra Modi and the Gujarat police in 2002 is painfully evident. Not everything is rosy on Planet India, and Kamdar is realistic about the desperation of many people's lives and the scale of the challenge facing India's rulers and policymakers. She could have said more about corruption (which Luce tackled more fully) and about the sterling work of social activists combating communalism, like Harsh Mander, Teesta Setalvad, or Shabnam Hashmi.
Planet India is a worthy addition to the burgeoning shelf of serious books about twenty-first-century India. Despite seeing all the tragedies and limitations, Kamdar comes down firmly on the side of the optimists about India. “One day soon,” she writes, “when a critical mass of the talent, the money, and the market is in Asia, a tipping point will be reached, and India will move from joining the game, or even winning the game, to inventing new rules for new games.”
It's a striking thought. And the last word should probably belong to an Indian, the man behind the success of Ambootia Tea, Sanjay Bhansal, who lends Kamdar a laptop so that she can take notes more efficiently during their interview. After describing his work and his plans, Bhansal remarks pithily, “So this is what is happening in India. My father could not have dreamt of what I am planning to do.” In that simple statement lies a world of hope for our country and our people.
57. Calls from the Center
IT HAS BECOME FASHIONABLE OF LATE, among our bien-pensant classes, to sneer at the success of India's business process outsourcing industry — the call centers and the like that have become the visible face of globalization in our formerly protectionist land. Some seven hundred thousand Indians work in the BPO business, which contributes an estimated $17 billion to the burgeoning Indian economy. The call center has become the symbol of India's newly globalized workforce: while traditional India sleeps, a dynamic young cohort of highly skilled, articulate professionals works through the night, functioning on U.S. time under made-up American aliases, pretending familiarity with a culture and climate they've never actually experienced, earning salaries that were un-dreamt of by their elders (but a fraction of what an American would make), and enjoying a lifestyle that's a cocktail of premature affluence and Westernization transplanted to an Indian setting.
It's been a major breakthrough for India and Indians, one that Anglophone countries in Africa, like Ghana and Kenya, are striving to emulate. But many in India see the call centers as soul-destroying sweatshops soaking up the talents and energies of young Indians who could and should be doing better for themselves and their country. Chetan Bhagat's best seller, One Night @ the Call Center, for instance, inveighs against young Indians wasting their time catering to the unreasonable and petty demands of American customers — customers so stupid, in Bhagat's telling, that an instructor teaches call center trainees the formula 10 = 35: “Remember, a thirty-five-year-old American's brain and IQ is the same as a ten-year-old Indian's.” As one of Bhagat's protagonists puts it in the novel's climactic scene: “An entire generation up all night, providing crutches for the white morons to run their lives… while bad bosses and stupid Americans suck the lifeblood out of our country's most productive generation.” One elitist friend of mine put it even more pithily: “All we're doing is providing coolie labor — carrying the excess baggage of globalization that's too clunky for the West to bother to lift.”
It's a harsh judgment, one that's genuinely unfair to the talent, dedication, and creativity of the young people who make the call centers work. But it's also out of date. If what India is doing is providing coolie labor, then today the coolies are scheduling the trains.
The evidence is striking. The business processes that are being outsourced are no longer just the airline reservations or customer billing or even minor technical troubleshooting that earlier made up the bulk of the call centers’ work. Today Indians are reading MRIs for American hospitals, running consulting services for global U.S. firms, handling actuarial work for British insurance companies, analyzing U.S. and European company stocks for Western institutional investors, and writing software that will prevent Boeing and Airbus planes from colliding in midair. Hardly menial tasks.
And there's more. When the U.S. pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly discovered a molecule recently that it needed to shepherd through extensive clinical research and human trials before it could be placed on the market, it gave the task to an Indian firm, Nicholas Piramal. Anand Giridharadas, who reported this in the New York Times, added that Infosys is designing part of the wing of the Airbus A380, Tata Consultancy Services is building the software for the cockpits, and a third Indian firm is designing the plane's doors. This is not just back-office work; it's the sort of fundamental responsibility that Western firms traditionally carried out in their national HQs, on the assumption that that was the only way they could guarantee quality. Today, they see India as a country that can provide the same quality — and a lot more cheaply.