Bangalore Calling by Brinda S. Narayan

Bangalore Calling is the debut work of Brinda S. Narayan, who has worked in the corporate sector for over a decade and half and currently lives in India, Bangalore. The author has lived and studied in the US in the past. The book’s back cover says that it attempts to explore the social costs of outsourcing - the erosion of cultures, the displacement of vernacular languages and accents in a world that’s not yet flat through fifteen linked stories.
The book revolves around the ironically and perhaps deliberately named Callus call centre and the various characters that dot its landscape – Yvette, the trainer, Saswath, the CEO, Akriti, the trainer/counselor, Natalie, the American collaborator for the trainers, the agents (Jimutha aka “Jimi”, Bitty aka “Betty”, and Azeem  aka Aaron), Varghese, the Admin guy, Rani the housecleaner and Panduranga, the driver.
The book (as the author acknowledges) is inspired by the ground breaking work of Arlie Hochschild’s The Managed Heart, a sociological look at how estranged personal feelings affect people in the service industry using the examples of airline attendants and bill collectors. In this book, the author extends the treatment to the BPO space, specifically contact centres where agents take on different names and assume different accents in order to serve customers from a different geography and culture.
The book is pioneering in its effort to take a sociological view of the call-centre space and commendable for its effort to do so using fiction. The contents reflect the years the author invested in drawing insight and creating an authentic insider’s view of the industry, to the extent that it sounds eerie that the author could be so many people at once! The book also holds a mirror to the India of today and how certain cultural/sociological issues are brushed under the carpet/mostly ignored and not just in the BPO space.
The book is quite well written and perhaps the best tale is that of Yvette who acts as the conscience keeper for the book. In a book that extends just over 300 pages, there is hardly anything worth an objection as the author keeps the readers engaged while effortlessly switching styles & tempos to match that of the character being portrayed. There is some stereotyping in the caricature of the CEO and the profile of a Bengali agent as someone with leftist leanings is perhaps clichéd. But they are rare blips in an otherwise good read.
In particular, the author’s narrative style of the world coming a full circle through the tales of its characters as the company around which its tale is told, responds to Hurricane Ike (the proverbial ‘storm’), make it entertaining.
Don’t be surprised if you end up seeing a movie made out of this