The New Mask of India

"....the idea is that no community is ever complete, neither are its needs exactly the same as those of other societies." -Idries Shah, The Way of the Sufi

Varun (or Victor for work purposes) declares: 'An air-conditioned sweat shop is still a sweatshop. In fact, it is worse because nobody sees the sweat. Nobody sees your brain getting rammed.'

News From Mongolia

-Chetan Bhagat, One Night @ The Call Centre

Unless we recognize the present low state of our community as contrasted with our ancient progressive civilization, and unless we soon introduce such reforms into our collective institutions as are calculated to bring about our regeneration, there will be no salvation for us, the Hindus, as a race. We should try and take off all causes of our degeneration. Whatever encrustations have gathered themselves in the lapse of time round our collective fabric, we should determined scrape them away.

-A. Mahadeva Sastri, The Vedic Law of Marriage

On September 15th, 2006 C. Mann, a representative of the Voices Ngo, delivered a lecture at Global College's South Asia center about how communities throughout India are seemingly benefited by their quality to entrance the newfound global communications infrastructure. He pressed the idea that former India is strengthened through its inclusion into the "global" culture and cheaper and that the Indian habitancy are empowered through this new principles of business and, subsequently, thought. It is my assertion that this particular "globalized" pattern of living, business, and philosophy, in essence, forms the foundations of a faith in business that cannot fit within the cultural bounds of all societies congruously and without drastic collective consequence.

It is my understanding that the main theme of C.Mann's lecture was that, in this "modernized" world, all habitancy are drawn into one collective spear of business and, by extension, culture. In lieu of this fact, he seemed to heavily imply that all habitancy of the world need to be "wired-in" to global facts technologies in order to continue development a living. He went on to speak with belief that, with this new technological ability, small-scale subsistence farmers will not only be able to sell to places that they have never sold to before but they can also watch Hollywood movies, American sitcoms and pro wrestling on the Tv. His position went on to directly state that the adaptation and, in many instances, appropriation of local customs into the base ambience gave strength to the communities from which these traditions arose. His delivery was curt, well-groomed, and with the fervor of man who had something to sell. But I could not buy it.

Globalization can be defined as a convention of ideology that envelopes all the habitancy of the world into a particular frame of economics, consumption, and conception which finds its beacon in the model set forth by the multi-national corporation. The habitancy of the world are now grouped together in two lump sums- the haves and the have-nots- while such inconveniences such as national and cultural lines are disintegrated. What is left is a dominant global mono-culture which revolves around the tidings of capitalistic consumption, exploitation, and expansion. In his summation of C.T. Kurian's work on the subject, Dr. Sakhi Athyal asserts that, ". . . This globe has been integrated by capitalist practices and ideology and has largely removed ideological polarization." The dilution of cultural unlikeness and polarization is of absolute necessity, as the ideal of this principles is the complete restructuring of societies for the construction of commercially fertile ground. The blemishes of cultural unlikeness have no place in the "modernizing" structure, as the formation of the 'two class one culture' principles is universally implemented globally. Athyal continues, ". . . In overview India has embraced a store economy, and as a consequent it has lead to unequal distribution of earnings and wealth which in turn leads to unequal distribution of power and hence to the exploitation of those with economic power over those who lack sufficient economic power." Globalization is not a process of cultural hegemony but is, conversely, the convention of a world- wide collective principles that grinds out any pre-standing cultural congruency's in the race of profit. In the words of the preeminent economist, Milton Friedman, "the corporation cannot be ethical; its only responsibility is to turn a profit." Globalization is the culture of the corporation.

The particular manner of inter-cultural communion that is the hallmark of the globalization process is much less a blending of varying cultures than the imposition of one particular cultural frame- the culture of commerce. This particular collective order is created and maintained through a belief in monetary acquisition that is tantamount to a faith. In such a system, people, animals, and the environment are degraded to their barest essentials, and are given value judgments base upon how much monetary "worth" they contain. Things of charm are not appreciated solely as such, but are great with remarks of their approximate value. To study man going through the rituals of recreational shopping is very similar to that of an personel in the mist of religious rigmarole. Under this industrial belief system, money represents time and time represents life; to make a buy is to recognize an equivalent quantum of your life as linked to the object's projected value. To buy is to sacrifice the life/time that it took to earn the money that was paid for the object. To buy is to worship life itself. This capitalistic way of viewing the world permeates into all strata of the collective fabric and, consequently, into the very psyches of all complex members. Capitalism is not simply an attribute of a community that can be surely separated from the mainstay of the culture; as capitalism is the culture itself. The South Asian Voice asserts that:

India has been lulled by the mantra of "liberalization" and "privatization". This mantra has delivered home appliances and electronic gadgets galore. But it is also time we comprehend what this mantra has not delivered. It has not delivered a contemporary infrastructure that keeps pace with growing demands and consumption of a still rapidly growing population. India is now able to satisfy the quiz, for items of personel consumption. But it seems thoroughly unable to satisfy the quiz, for items of collective consumption - such as clean air or clean water or a smooth communication network.

The pressures of this industrial culture upon foreign communities has had the consequent of enacting a gross manner of cultural dilution, in which opposing inter-cultural ideas seem to simply cancel each other out or, at most, dispell each other; leaving a pale frame in the place of what was once vibrant color, dare I say- distinction. This is not a melting pot in which the riches of many cultures are joyously mixed together and kept intact, but rather a centrifuge in which a gyroscopic force serves to throw the charm of cultural unlikeness out to the periphery, before dissolving it all together. What remains are cultures with no roots, communities without communication, and habitancy with no direction. I am from the United States; I know this corporate culture intimately.

I come to India because it is traditionally a world apart from this industrial culture and I find vicarious substance from the ideal of her people, places, traditions, and cultural distinctions. It seems as if the essence of the former Indian collective principles lays in piety and family role, which appears to be qualities that should thoroughly contradict the individualized, western perspective that breeds excess and consumption. But this seems to be changing due to the up-to-date influx of western companies that must, due to the nature of their business, enact a procedure of cultural indoctrination that seems to be ideal fodder for young Indians looking to stake out their own place in the collective sphere. This is due to the easy fact that the type of businesses that are currently being brought to India are that which contribute facts services to habitancy of predominantly western origin. In this particular dichotomy, Indian-ness is not encouraged and is, in fact, covered up with learned "western" forms of behavior and speaking that are pan-inclusively carried out in all aspects of the workplace. As the journalist George Monbiot wrote, "The most marketable skill in India today is the quality to abandon your identity and slip into man else's." This particular brand of workplace indoctrination is no good exemplified than in the anthropologists Carol Upadhya and Sahana Udupa's documentary satire, "Fun @ Sun."

In this twenty itsybitsy video on the workplace environment of Sun Microsystems' Bangalore center, Upadhya and Udupa slyly show how a preparatory "neo-corporate" mind-set is created and maintained throughout all spheres of the workday. It showed scenes of "hunky-dory" celebrations in which employees all get together in designated locations, laugh at designated prompts, and speak in designated tongues in the name of "fun," interdependence, and corporate trend. On this phenomenon, Makarand Paranjape, an English professor at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University says, ". . . [we are] looking an endeavor to eroticize the [It] industry, an endeavor to make it a culturally inviting place, hip and cool. Of procedure it's a bit of a fantasy: there is nothing glamorous about call centres; they are dehumanizing, decultured places." This principles of deculturation seems to be enforced with a sort of gang mentality in which there is a set collective line that is enforced by all complex members rather than a sole "boss" figure. This "same paging" seems to be a tactic of cultural subversion that is as subtle as the industrial revolution was direct; with an end consequent that is quite the same- programmed, acculturated employees.

The hallmark of this employee programming is found in the fact that there seems to be a set image and way of acting that is projected upon the employees within this new corporate work environment. During a visit to a Dell call center in Bangalore, I was able to make surface observations of this new work culture first hand. Whilst baking beneath inviting florescent lights and sitting inside of cubicles, the young workers all wore western clothing, spoke intentionally neutral English (deficient of as much Indian accent as possible), and interacted with each other openly. The mean age of an employee was around 22-25 years old, and there were a comparable number of women as men. The walls of the center were lined with posters showing parody scenes of Indians and westerners interacting and doing business together, complete with slogans of workplace solidarity and team work. The dress and habit of the workers is this environment were very unavoidable from that of the mean Indian and one could surely distinguish an It/ Bpo employee in the streets of an Indian city. I found out that the mean wages of an employee in this sector is around ,000 Us a year; which enables them to live the rather extravagant, western-like, lifestyle that goes along with the profession's collective image (while at the same time recovery the business the cost of hiring westerners at ten times the cost). In an description on the cultural impacts of the It industry, Amelia Gentleman describes the call center scene as a place where, "thousands of young male and female college graduates spend the night confined in close presence (breaking down the former distance between the sexes), working to Us-time in smart, contemporary offices, adopting alien American identities, performing mindless tasks but earning salaries larger than Whatever their parents could aspire to."

These particularities form the development of a new sub-culture that will have a great impact on subsequent generations. As an anonymous author put forth in the May 2001 issue of the "South Asian Voice:"

For the It-literate, job opportunities have been plentiful, and there are also opportunities to live and earn abroad. For the English-speaking upper middle-class, this has come as a boon. With greater entrance to disposable income, the seduction of consumerism becomes hard to resist, and the quiz, for unrestricted globalization inevitably follows the attraction for new and ever more industrialized buyer goods. This new and more flourishing class of Indian consumers associates India's improve with the availability of the latest automobile models and buyer goods. The local availability of imported European cosmetics and fashions, imported drinks and confectioneries - these have all become important to those who have sufficient disposable earnings to buy such items.

The macrocosmic cultural impacts of this newly appropriated "corporateness" are multi-faceted and increase deep into the Indian collective environment. It seems as if former values and roles are being severed in a particular generation and the overlaying, trickle-through impacts are affecting all spheres of South Asian culture. I asked a Bpo collective relations official, who has made international sales and marketing his career, if he lived a life that was similar to that of his parents. He, of course, told me that he did and that the up-to-date subterfuge of western companies has no great impact on Indian society. But he was paid to tell me this, and the fact that he was in his mid-40's and could not find a marriage partner, in a country where parents arrange their children's marriages at relatively young ages, due to his profession told me a very distinct story. There seems to be a deeply seeded identity crisis in which India is development believe to itself that it is still Indian while at the same time co-opting the apparent fruits of this neo-colonial mono-culture. How can a culture hold itself up in depth when it needs to adapt its very face to exist in the contemporary economy? I do not know the retort to this question, but the cultural impacts of this transformation have already made a running tear in the Indian collective fabric.

The cultural changes that have resulted from this influx of western technology, employment, and ideals were not more apparent to me than on a visit to a nursing home just surface of India's It capital, Bangalore. The conception of a nursing home in India is a thoroughly foreign conception as, traditionally, the elderly are taken care of by their children and/ or relatives. But in "modernizing" India the dilution of family role seems to be part of the corporate package; as employees in the It/Bpo sector, due to work requirements and their 'western' acculturation, are often not able to contribute sufficient care for their elderly parents. I fell into fertile conversation with one woman whose son was an engineer at a German technology company. She told me that she had to come into the nursing home because her son's mindset did not allow any room for her former ways of home rearing. She told me that he was a contemporary man and attended to contemporary things and how he conception that his new western ways were excellent to that of her time-honed Indian folk wisdom. Her elderly friends to her left and right eagerly agreed with what she was saying and shook their heads in disbelief about the predicament that they found themselves in. She spoke with distain when she said that, "People today make more money but they also spend more. They do not save. They do not listen to the lessons of the old. They have nothing." This seems to be the theme of the elderly everywhere, but this woman was heavily hit by the westernizing wreaking ball, and she knew that her former Indian values would not be carried into supplementary generations. The chain of folk knowledge was broken at this juncture and the impacts of such are forever stretching. There is no going back; there can be no retrieval, as soon as the great line of generational knowledge is disrupted, thousands of years of tradition are, proverbially as well as literally, gone in the years.

We are all entering upon a pale, pale plastic world, and with each day new societies are eagerly embracing changes that ultimately dissolve their heritage. The mono-cultural blankness of the western corporation is taking hold in any place and communities are losing their time-honed unlikeness and identity as a result. As the American folk musician Robert Blake sings, "Hollywood movies are cultural degradation." The popularizing of a former folk song in a Bollywood movie does nothing to sustain the culture from which it arose. Rather, all this accomplishes is the caricaturizing of a deep meaning folk song into a medium that is sellable. When this happens, the tradition is not enhanced but is lost altogether. To put something as pure and heartfelt as a folksong into a chintzy Bollywood jingle is to severe the song from its roots and leave an artificially packaged frame in its place.

There is something in this world more meaningful than price-tags, more solid than the numbers on currency, and more human than television. There is substance beyond the reach of corporations and a human spirit that is indomitable by neo-colonial indoctrination. I recently heard a professor rhetorically ask what the good is of tribal habitancy development jewelry for themselves surface of the realm of commerce, and I must retort with a particular word: 'everything.' The standardized corporate modal of business and living simply cannot be absorbed by every community of the world without the severe dilution of the attributes that make cultures distinctly themselves. To "modernize" is to leave a culture stripped of substance; to "globalize" is to enforce a corporate derived mono-culture upon distinctly unique human societies. If this movement continues unabated we will find that a world paved in pale, blank, strip malls and habitancy who know nothing other than that which is televised is all that will remain.

The New Mask of India

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