by MARK SLUTSKY

Chances are that if you’ve recently received a call urging you to change your long-distance carrier or offering you a newspaper subscription, or if you’ve had to talk to a technical support rep about a malfunctioning computer, that you’ve been talking to someone not only in another country, but on the other side of the world. It’s no secret that it’s become increasingly profitable to farm out telemarketing and other call-centre jobs to countries where wages and worker protections are markedly lower.

Bombay Calling is a new NFB documentary directed by Montrealers Samir Mallal and Ben Addelman, the team behind the acclaimed Concordia campus strife doc Discordia, and featuring a score by fellow local Ramachandra Borcar (aka DJ Ram). It’s an intimate examination of the effects of outsourcing, not here, but in India where the last decade has seen a boom in the IT work contracted by British and American firms. The film takes an up-close view of the people whose lives are being directly affected by globalization, focusing on the workers at Epicenter Technologies, a call centre in India.

The film’s subjects include Kas Lalani, CEO of DMM, the British company who contracted Epicenter and who has nascent operations in other outsourcing hotspots around the world; Ankita “Wendy” Purkayastha, who intends to make a rare “love marriage” with co-worker Baljit Singh; Charles Thomas, an overworked Roman Catholic with a Virgin Mary in his cubicle and a fondness for drink; and Sweetlana Dias, who wants to provide for her family back home. “We’d read an article in the paper about a call centre in India where young Indians were ‘neutralizing’ their accents, quote-unquote, and memorizing baseball scores,” Mallal says. “The angle was that these people were sacrificing their identities for this new kind of job that’s arrived in India, so we thought that was kind of absurd and interesting, and we thought that this was a good way to take a look at the cultural and economic changes going on India over the past few years. And hey, free trip to India!”

Impromptu Bollywood party

“We were lucky, because pretty much the first person we met was somebody who worked at the call centre we ended up using in the film,” Addelman says. The two-man crew eventually installed themselves in a Bombay apartment and followed the fortunes of the company’s employees for the better part of a year. “We adopted this style we used in Discordia,” Mallal says. “We tried to be really low-impact, low-key, using handheld and not shoulder-mounted cameras, and gathering sound without a sound person.”

It was surprisingly easy getting their subjects to open up. “They were actually remarkably comfortable in front of the camera,” Mallal says.

“I think it’s a cultural thing,” Addelman adds. “Indian people are much, much less self-conscious around cameras and much less suspicious of what you’re doing, and much more forthright. There’s definitely an innocence.”

Of course that camera-friendliness wasn’t always a plus. “India has this huge culture of stardom and Bollywood, and that sort of fantasy world,” Mallal says. “Your average Joe mimics a lot of what he sees in Bollywood movies, so often when we’d be shooting outside we’d have to get the shot really in the first couple of minutes, otherwise we’d get tons of people dancing in front of the camera!”

“You definitely have a time limit before people start to gather around behind you,” says Addelman. “The next thing you know there’s 50 or 60 people behind you, and then people start jumping in front of the camera, and while they’re mostly friendly, you also get a couple of hostile people. Which is the nice thing about the way we shoot: everything fits in a backpack. So I’d quickly load up, walk 50 feet and then do it again.”

Western influences

One thing the filmmakers found was that outsourcing has had subtler and more complicated effects than just the blanket imposition of American accents and music on India. “At first we wanted to find examples of Western culture having a sort of comedic effect,” Addelman says. “That’s what all these articles we’d read were about. They were really condescending, but we didn’t realize how condescending they were until we actually went there. Because it isn’t all like that. People have a much more nuanced and back-and-forth relationship with Western culture—like, Indian MTV is all Bollywood stuff. It’s not like they’re passive receptors to this monolithic culture that’s destroying this pristine thing. But a lot of people really think that it is and think that our film whitewashes over that.

“It’s the biggest complaint we get—‘Why don’t you address neo-colonialism?’ But our goal was to find these people and let them tell the story. Their relationship with people in the West is a curious one, just the way ours would be about someone over there—and none of them said they wanted to go make their lives in the West.”

“I think a lot of people have it in their heads that globalization is bad, point blank,” Mallal adds. “But there’s sort of a grey area, there are nuances, and that’s what you find out when you go over there and actually talk to people.”

The Indian dream

Some of the Bombay Calling’s subjects, like the charming Sweetlana or “Sweetie,” have moved to the big city to pursue a life—and ambitions, like buying a house—undreamed of by their parents. “Most of them are from small villages,” Mallal says. “They’ve come to make it in this new Indian dream.”

And for better or worse, the new generation’s emergent middle class—or at least the relative fraction of it with access to this kind of work—is experiencing a shift in values and traditions. “It’s really shaking things up,” Addelman says. “These kids, these 21-year-olds, are making three to four times more than their parents. So there’s a generation gap of the type I don’t think we’ve seen in North America for a really long time.

“On the one hand, they’re making tons of money, but they drink now, and it’s harder for parents to control them. There’s a drinking culture, there’s a nightclub culture.”

“People are adapting to this new influx of money and culture,” Mallal says. “For example, at the call centre, there’s a lot of dating that goes on. This is an anomaly in India, a workplace where men and women hang out together and go out at night. The vast majority of people in India still get arranged marriages, but it’s changing a little bit now. People are meeting in these places, and they still need to get the okay from their parents but there is more casual dating going on. And people are intimidated by it, especially the older generation. They see it as a threat to their traditional values.”

Evolving identities

But for the younger people themselves (incidentally, the country has the largest under-25 population in the world), Addelman says that “it gives people a sense of Indian pride. A lot of the things they say are sort of unrealistic—like that some day the rupee will be the equivalent of the American dollar—maybe some day that will happen, but it’s really far off. But people, at least on the surface, are really buying the hype that India is going to be the next big thing. They really, really, really want it. And they’re proud of it. They don’t want to move to America or the U.K.”

“I think that the idea that this is sort of a threat to Indian culture is not true,” Mallal says. “Over there they’re not insecure about their identity in a way that we are here. So for them, faking their accents, or changing things, having this income, choosing to not go to university, it’s still a big deal but it doesn’t make them less Indian. I think that the definition of what ‘Indian’ is is evolving, it’s not stagnant, and in a sense I think it’s a positive thing overall.”

Bombay Calling screens at the NFB Cinema (1564 St-Denis) on Tuesday, August 22 at 7 and 9 p.m., $5. The Bombay Calling DVD, featuring director’s commentary and Mallal and Addelman’s short doc Heavy Metal India, about a death metal show in Bangalore, hits stores the same day

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