THE BPO SUBCULTURE

(With malice towards none)

TIME AND SPACE have been the area of speculation for Philosophers from days of yore.

From the time Corporate started looking for outsourcing many of their activities as a major cost cutting measure, BPOs started growing in geometrical proportions. As they crossed over geographical boundaries and time zones in their areas of operations, ‘Time and Space”, the Philosophers preoccupation, have almost become plaything for the BPOs.

As the locals apprehend that Indian BPOs would rob them of their jobs, the BPOs have started incurring the displeasure, if not wrath and fury, of the locals everywhere. To win over the loyalties of their customers in distant habitats who belong to different races, the BPO boys and girls, like Jeeves (the P.G.Wodehouse mascot) try to serve them, imbibing their culture, with great élan, without losing sight of the fact that thy do not belong to their customers in their class or race. Thus, an Yadugiri Rao would acquire Yorkshire accent and a Mangalore boy Mahesh would familiarize himself with Manchester Station train timings in the British Rail and a Radhika would explain the significance of riders to customers of Prudential Insurance.

Unlike the IIT, IIM products, that aspire for and occupy the high end of the Organizations they serve, the BPO boys and girls, being average academics, are vanguard of the lower ends. If in the campus selection, the IIT and IIM graduates walk over with a hundred thousand dollars of package from MNCs and over a million rupees from Indian Corporate, in the BPOS, a few thousand rupees are available for a grab, even for the graduates with grace mark. The graduation from a few hundred rupees of pocket money to a few thousand rupees of monthly salary, transform the BPOs boys and girls who now have money to spare, but struggle for minutes. The available time they spend in Café Coffee Days or in selecting CDs in Planet Ms, though they may be aspiring to spend an evening with a girl/boy of their choice, in a Star Hotel discotheque. Mobile Phone with a camera and FM radio facility, is the only luxury they boast of. As many of them work during the night time, and as they are being picked from their place of stay to their place of work in Tata Sumos and Tat Indicas, they do not meet people except their colleagues sitting in front of the PCs with earphones intact, and in the process a few also develop intimate friendship, leading to wedlock failing which waylaying and wounded heads. Career life among BPO boys and girls is short lived and they constantly look for pastures new. To have spent three years at one place for them is as tedious as living for a millennium. Their world shrinks to the size of their domain knowledge. As a BPO is an area of exuberance for youth, middle age is a misfit here.

If in the earlier decades, to serve coffee in a Café was a condescending reference, today, Call centres have taken the place. If you don’t do well in your studies, you would end up in a Call centre only, an anxious mother would warn her ward. In the marriage market, call centre boys’ and girls’ credentials are not cared for, as if they play for the B team. The IT and financial guys have a halo around them and they score over the rest. BPOs get only the left over. Many of the IT Companies have their own BPOs as appendages and their employees are looked upon as underprivileged ones. ‘Is your son only in the BPO of Infosys?’ proud mother of a Wipro Software engineer would ask, inquisitively, if not impetuously. Start your career in a BPO, but don't use it for settling down, a seventy plus would give sagely advice to his grand children.

Today BPOs have come to stay. They have transformed colleges into catchment areas for jobs. A few may find the BPOs as areas of darkness, and yet, the vast majority finds them as spots of illumination to bask, at times a little boisterously too, perhaps to the bewilderment of those around them. A country of a little over a billion, certainly looks upon BPOs as Saviour.