Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (34 page)

I took the very large number of Christian churches in Bangalore (I counted nine without going out of my way) to be a reflection of the culture of the British residents, whose retiring here was the penultimate stop on their way to salvation. Some quiet streets survived, with many old trees at their margins—unusual in India, where road-widening is a
government policy. So some of old Bangalore remained, but it was overwhelmed by new buildings and construction sites: gated communities, new hotels, a real estate boom, speculation in land and housing, and the sort of eternal work in progress that I saw in every Indian city I visited.

"This will be our new flyover..."

I saw the thing everywhere. It was always under construction—people sleeping under it, cows congregating near it for shade, slogans painted on it. And I had the feeling that when at last the flyover was finished, it would be inadequate.

On my way to International Tech Park at Whitefield, at one corner of Bangalore, my driver said, "You know Sai Baba? That is his ashram."

So instead of going to Tech Park, I went to the ashram.

Bhagwan Sri Sathya Sai Baba was born not far away, at Puttaparthy, on the train line to Chennai; and he set up his ashram here for the same reason all the rest of the companies did—the agreeable weather, the shady streets, the gentle nature of old Bangalore.

The ashram sat behind a big wall, but the security guards welcomed me with
namastes. Love in Action
was printed in big letters on the ashram's inner wall. A huge open-sided hall with a high roof housed the fresh-air platform where Swami held his daily
darshan,
or spiritual meeting, with his followers. To comprehend the Swami's teachings you had only to look at his symbol, which was a circle containing the emblems of the world's great faiths: a cross representing Christianity, a crescent for Muslims, the Zoroastrian flame, and so on for Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Conflating all these faiths, Sai Baba had created a belief system that included almost everyone. But he seemed to reject the idea that he was leading a religion.

"'No religion, no prayer,' Swami says." This homily was from a volunteer caretaker wearing a badge with a Swami saying:
Work is worship.

"Just follow your own religion. Love yourself."

The unmistakable image of the Swami I had seen in many taxis, many homes, on many desks and office walls: the kindly smile, the frizz of hair.

The caretaker was Narayan. "Swami says, 'Heart to heart. No preaching. Only serve humanity with true heart.'"

This sounded agreeable to me, so I decided to dismiss my taxi and look around the ashram. The Swami was not in residence. His art deco villa sat empty, in lovely gardens, behind a high fence.

I chatted with some devotees, but they were oblique and wouldn't lin
ger or tell me their names ("Don't use my name, use Swami's"). They were emphatic in saying that Sai Baba had had no guru as a youth, though he did have a previous incarnation. And a new incarnation would appear in the near future—probably the year 2030.

Swami in recent pictures was smaller, slighter, older than his celebrated photographs suggested, the hair a less symmetrical frizz-ball, his smile more fatigued than impish. But he was eighty. His direct confrontation, his practical advice, his refusal to preach—the essential Swami appealed to these people.

"He will leave his body at ninety-six," one devotee said. "And after some eight years, the third and last incarnation will be born. Named Prema Sai. I wish to observe this."

The non-Indian devotees had the least patience with my questions, but one of the Indian ashramites explained some of the subtleties of Sai Baba's thought. "Swami teaches that there are four types of people.
Artha
type. Poor in all senses, scarred on the inside.
Arthathee
type. They want things. They seek to have things.
Jidnyasu
type. They only have questions. They need answers. And the
Jnani
type, who are enlightened. They know everything. They see a cloud and they know it will rain."

I said, "I think I'm a
Jidnyasu.
Just questions."

"Yes. I can see." I was taking notes—these were hard words to spell.

"Swami says, 'I'm not here to preach new thoughts.'"

That was a good approach.

"Don't search for God out there—search within yourself. Attain happiness. Search for
ananda"
—bliss or serenity.

I said, "I've been trying."

"'What is God?' Swami asks. And he answers, 'It is experience.'"

"I like that."

"Believe in yourself."

With that, the devotee left me to find my own path. I sat near the twice-life-size statue of the tuneful goddess Saraswati, who was depicted playing her sitar. I remembered someone had told me that Sai Baba could work miracles, but lovable ones, such as producing chocolates in his hand for children.

"Yes, he does miracles," another devotee said. "But only to attract illiterates.
Chamatkara,
they are called. They are meant to astonish you."

There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of accounts of Sai Baba's miracles, claiming they were proof of his divinity. These included mak
ing objects such as crucifixes and Bibles appear, multiple healings, miraculous messages, instances of translocation—the transfer of humans, some of them dead—and a celebrated manifestation of the Koh-i-Noor diamond when Sai Baba criticized an audience for being dazzled by the gem: "Did any one of you even glance at me who created it, as you clamored for a look at that piece of creation?" Many former adherents had come forward to denounce Sai Baba for faking his miracles.

But the basic philosophy emphasizes the inner light that people can find in their own hearts, and the power of practical work.
Hands that help are better than lips that pray
—one of the Swami's sayings would not have sounded strange if spoken by Lenin, Mao, Jesus, or Jimmy Carter.

"People come here from all over," the guard at the front gate said. "Some imams from Iraq. And Ravi Shankar. Hillary Clinton wanted to come, but security was a problem, so she didn't come."

Near this quiet compound of spiritual renewal—down the noisy congested road—was more of booming Bangalore. I walked outside the gate and took a taxi to International Tech Park. Its new buildings loomed in the distance, rising from watermelon stands, clusters of rickshaws, fix-it shops, juice stands, and food stalls.

Behind the walls of Tech Park, among the towering glass-and-steel buildings with glittering signs—Infosys, Oracle, Disa, Think Inc., and others—was one for Perot Systems. I recalled the diminutive, quack-voiced, jug-eared Texan, Ross Perot, running for president of the United States on a platform called United We Stand America, which included the pledge to prevent jobs from being outsourced to places like India. Perot spoke of how we would hear "a giant sucking sound" as American jobs were lost. Now, having failed in his bid for the presidency, the quacking tycoon had found that Indians in Bangalore would work for a fraction of what an American would earn.

Many of the jobs being done in the Bangalore call centers had once been performed in the United States by college students and housewives. All were part-timers. The work was tedious and poorly paid.

But around 2001, American companies—and there were now thousands of them in this city alone—discovered that young Indian graduates with good degrees, fluent in English, well-mannered, patient, and persistent, would do the same jobs, full time, for very little money. The city had become so widely recognized as a business alternative that in an
April 2006 episode of
The Simpsons,
the town of Springfield outsourced the operation of its nuclear plant, and Homer Simpson went to Bangalore to find Indian employees for the plant. Bangalore was perhaps the best-known center of cheap, trainable labor in the world. I wondered why, until I went there and found that at the time I visited the call centers, the entry-level employees (most of them university graduates) were earning less than $2,500 a year. Bangalore's prosperity rests on these people—their need for work, their high educational attainments, their skills, their good character, their prudent austerity, their punctuality, their humble status, and most of all their willingness to work for low pay.

"Cannot proceed," the security man at the gate in Tech Park said to my taxi driver. So I made some inquiries and got permission to visit another call center, this one in yet another gated compound of big company offices, Electronics City Phase 2. This phase was only two years old but was already filled with flourishing businesses—that is, foreign businesses with Indian employees.

I went in the evening, because that was when the callers would be dealing with the western United States, California specifically. I was led through another gateway, another security fence, into a modern building with a few Indian touches—a shrine to the elephant god, Ganesh, god of new endeavors, and an artificial waterfall. I was given an ID badge for security purposes, I was signed in, and I was shown through the labyrinthine headquarters.

"Bangalore used to be quiet and sleepy," Hardeep, the night manager, told me. "It is now working day and night. It's cosmopolitan, people from everywhere. Less than thirty percent of the people in Bangalore are local, because of IT growth."

I said, "The IT people in Mumbai said they were worried about Chinese competition."

"Yes, the Chinese are trying to compete, but they have a different mind-set. Ask a Chinese worker to tighten a screw, he will make three turns. The Indian will give an extra turn."

"I'll try to remember that. What about money?"

"Our cost of business is going up, but we are still forty to fifty percent more cost-effective. Now the IT industry in India is sixteen to eighteen billion dollars. By 2008 it will be sixty to eighty billion."

"I meant what does a call center worker earn?"

Hardeep hemmed and hawed, but I found out by nosing around that
the answer was from $50 to $60 a week, often a fifty-hour week, and that might include a night shift that ended at three or four in the morning.

"We don't think about China—China is already playing a role. We think, What is the next India?"

"What's the answer?"

"Maybe Philippines. But political instability is there. Attempts have been made in Africa. Ghana was looked at, but no good results were found."

I was impatient to see and hear Indians on the phone. I hadn't managed much of this in Mumbai. Hardeep said that he could show me those rooms but that I could not divulge the names of the companies involved. I said okay, though I recognized some of them—banking and mortgage groups, and the names of some airlines.

"This wing is tech support," and he named a large airline. "Let's say someone is processing a boarding pass anywhere in the world, doing a check-in, and they have a problem with anything. They call, and the call is answered by one of these tech people."

"Can I listen?"

I cocked my head to the earphones and heard an American voice at the other end, perhaps in Los Angeles, saying, "So do I just put that ten-digit code in?"

The tech person was a friendly-looking man, about thirty, studying a computer screen as he helped the airline employee in an airport far, far away.

"This is internal organization support," Hardeep said, "not an end customer."

"What's the difference?"

"End-customer support is voice-based, requires accent—U.S. or U.K. You are identified with a particular country. 'Hello, I'm John...'"

"But it's really Mohun, isn't it?"

"For our purposes, it's John."

We were passing down a corridor and into a new room with about a hundred cubicles and workstations. At each one sat a young Indian man or woman. They looked like students working late at the library, except that they were on the phone and the room was humming with their voices. The call center employees worked from scripts, and all calls were recorded so they could be reviewed for effectiveness.

"The brand image from a consumer perspective should not change,
or else the person on the phone in the U.S. will think you're taking a job away."

Which was exactly what was happening: an Indian helping an American to solve a problem with a computer or an appliance or an insurance form.

This fascinated me: Indians mimicking Americans, not just in the way they were dressed (short-sleeved shirts, blue jeans, sneakers), but in the American jobs they were doing, using broad American accents. All had American first and last names.

I met "Lynn Hayes," who was born Hasina, in Kerala, on the coast. She was twenty-two, unmarried, and worked from 5:30
P.M.
until 2:30
A.M.
at the call center—the best time to call California. She was cold-calling contractors in the San Francisco area, to sign them up for a home warranty company that wanted its own fix-it men.

Listening in, I heard a blunt "Who's this?"

"Lynn Hayes," Hasina said in a neutral, regionless American accent. "May I please speak to the manager?"

"He's out."

"When is he expected in the office, please?"

The accent was American, this politeness wasn't.

"I dunno," the woman at the other end said.

"May I call you back?"

"Up to you. He's pretty busy."

Lynn Hayes persisted until she was able to find a time when the manager of this firm of contractors might be in.

"We have to sign up two hundred and twenty-five American contractors a month for this company," Hardeep said. "They have to be involved in plumbing, electrical, building, and so forth. It's almost impossible to find them in some states. New York is tough. Arizona is better. California is hard."

"How does she know who to call?"

"We purchase telephone numbers."

These were the leads—I thought of them as the Glengarry leads, and I imagined this room of callers fitting neatly into the plot of David Mamet's
Glengarry Glen Ross,
the definitive drama on cold-calling and rejection. The workers in Bangalore were not vying for bonuses or a set of steak knives, but every time one of them snagged a contractor, he or she got a gold star on the leader board.