Easy Come, Easy Go

How long will the Indian economic boom last? It is anybody’s guess at this point. From the standpoint of investment, profits and productivity, the Indian economy seems to be chugging along, undeterred by the mayhem in its neighboring states, and seemingly oblivious of the depths of discontent at home. That India has become the world’s Walmart of clerical service work is well enough known–the call centers, BPOs and other outsourcing-driven ventures have been hailed as bringing a new prosperity to Indian cities.

Educated professionals in their twenties and thirties have no doubt benefited tremendously from the outsourcing boom. As call-center and BPO workers’ wages have increased, their rising living standards have encouraged them to identify with the upper classes, with dreams of upward social mobility, on the one hand, and delusions of national(ist) grandeur on the other. The “I” figures rather prominently in these urban workers’ conception of “India, Inc.”

An increasingly commodified and consolidated media environment has further encouraged this process, depoliticising and “dumbing down” an already denuded social and cultural milieu. Indian news media, shamelessly and blindly pursuing the American Way, have adopted the same norms of sensationalist reporting that have been so effective in stifling creative and critical public discourse in the West.

Arundhati Roy hit the nail on the head in her speech at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, in 2003. The Indian media, she said, are increasingly moving towards a model of “crisis reportage”:

Crisis reportage in the twenty-first century has evolved into an independent discipline–almost a science. The money, the technology, and the orchestrated mass hysteria that goes into crisis reporting has a curious effect. It isolates the crisis, unmoors it from the particularities of the history, the geography, and the culture that produced it. Eventually it floats free like a hot-air balloon, carrying its cargo of international gadflies–specialists, analysts, foreign correspondents, and crisis photographers with their enormous telephoto lenses.

Somewhere mid-journey and without prior notice, the gadflies auto-eject and prachute down to the site of the next crisis, leaving the crestfallen, abandoned balloon drifting aimlessly in the sky, pathetically masquerading as a current event, hoping it will at least make history.

There are few things sadder than a consumed, spent crisis.

Such a media environment encourages people to ignore, rather than try to understand, the degradation of the world in which they live. And when the crises are occurring in far-off, unknown places, like Nandigram or Singur, or the slums and shantytowns of one’s own city, they are easily forgotten and dismissed as the necessary “price of progress.” Globalization is a benevolent force. War is peace.

To the extent that they are deemed to require an explanation at all.

Most often, however, the response of this layer of educated, urban workers is a shrugging of the shoulders. A perverse indifference to those who are worse off than themselves and a cavalier nonchalance are today markers of one’s trendiness. A social conscience is for losers, it seems. Try to engage these folks around the burning issues of the day, and you will be roundly rebuked for being “too deep” and “out of touch.”

And those who, like Arundhati Roy, try to shake up this complacent attitude are simply dismissed out of hand.

“Puhleez,” scoffed an old friend in Mumbai recently, “she is the most pretentious writer and person in India today.” This, from someone who considers herself a journalist, and according to whom even this blog is too “deep,” for journalism, she tells me, is “all about bullet points, not going into details.” Enough said.

This apolitical atmosphere among the urban youth and educated working-class professionals in their 20s and 30s, fueled by conditions of economic boom and nationalist hubris, will probably continue for a while to come.

But one element of this boom has always been much more fragile and tenuous than the talking heads would admit. This is the world of outsourcing, of call centers and BPOs, boosted thus far by low wages, a vast pool of skilled urban workers, and Western multinationals looking for greater rates of profit. There is still a good deal of steam left even in this sector of the economy, but it is showing signs of overheating. According to an article in The Australian, some American companies are beginning to close down their India operations and return to their own shores because of the rise in wages in cities like Bangalore. I’m not predicting imminent doom, but this does point to the fact that the outsourcing boom is built on uncertain foundations–it always was.

For the multinationals, this young, enthusiastic, and loyal workforce, which has adopted so much of the ideology of globalization, is quite expendable.

Easy come, easy go.