Sunset industry

The nightlife here is bookended by the demands of work. Some step out to grab street food from carts selling egg rolls and chhole-kulcha. While others, like Jaspreet and Yogeesh Ghuliani, have a leisurely dinner of chicken fried rice and buttery aloo parantha on the greasy tables set out on the road, before returning to work. “In the eight years ‘ve been working for GE, I have been on the morning shift once,” says Ghuliani. “So ‘s food is something I have almost every day,” he says, pointing to the stall and its owner from Bengal.

Like Ghuliani, many have grown accustomed to a life that their parents would not have dreamed of. A country that awoke to freedom at the midnight hour was never really a creature of the night. Our parents awoke to the strains of Akashvani in the morning and slept at 10, without fuss. But between 1993 and 1994, when the first call centre was set up in India, and the initial years of the new millennium, metropolitan India’s body clock found a new rhythm. Every night, thousands of fresh-out-of-college youngsters turned from Raj to Roger and Uma to Amy and stayed up till dawn in air-conditioned offices to sell insurance or credit cards to Americans.

For India, they became a symbol of its confused and troubled modernity and triggered prophecies of a Western cultural invasion. Chetan Bhagat denounced the call centres as “airconditioned sweatshops” in One NightThe Call Centre and Ashim Ahluwalia made a documentary with a dream-like feel, John and Jane. “The idea of virtual ‘call agents’ with fake American identities who talked on the phone all night seemed straight out of science fiction…It is quite a bizarre job if you think about it,” says Ahluwalia over e-mail.

Indians are getting used to this idea of the bizarre. Today, the BPO industry, which helped India reimagine itself as a global IT player, employs seven lakh people and is worth

Rs 44,000 crore (Nasscomm figures for 2007). The bigger companies no longer make their employees use aliases; the emphasis now is on “neutral accents” and not “American or British ones”. Ghuliani, an electronics engineer, for instance, was Ben Thomas when he started out and is now Yogi to his customers across the world.

In the metros, moreover, erratic hours no longer raise eyebrows. Bakshi, however, says that the one thing he would like to change about his job is how it is perceived. “Unko lagta hai ki hum aish karne aate hai (People think we are having a great time),” agrees Pavan Arya, Bakshi’s colleague from Assam. “We are like any other professionals, working hard to earn money,” says Arya, who is 24. Bakshi goes further, claiming for his work the role of India’s emissary to an ignorant world. “The other day I spoke to a client from London and I told him that in Delhi, too, we have Bentleys and Hummers. Man, was he surprised.”

Nights have also changed for

22-year-old Irfan Khan, who is part of an often overlooked narrative of the India Story. Khan is one of the lakhs of private security guards in the country entrusted with the job of guarding apartment complexes, ATMs and malls. He guards a Citibank ATM in central Delhi, works every day of the week for 12 hours and does night shifts every alternate week. He has no off-days. His home is in Bareilly and the money he sends—a little over

Rs 5,000 a month—keeps his family going. The boredom gets to him, he admits. “Kya kare? Itni berozgari hai (What to do? There is so much unemployment).”A measure of the significance of this Rs 4,000-crore industry lies in one piece of statistic—for the 25 lakh policemen who guard the country, there are 60 lakh security guards.

Though Khan belongs to a world different from that of Bakshi and Yogi, he, too, is a product of a new age, where the cycles of work are making old certainties appear strange. Daylight, for instance. “After night shifts, you are not used to looking at the sun,” says Dipankar Mundu, a former call centre employee, now in Shillong. Or the city itself, which appears a different being to those who travel on its deserted streets at night.

At Convergys, meanwhile, another shift has come to an end. And Bakshi is back at the dhaba, for another chai. Some would say this schizophrenia, this shuttling between worlds of great contrasts, has always been, in a lesser or greater degree, part of the experience of living in this country. The more pertinent point—in this new India, you cannot turn back the body clock.