Books - One Night @ the Call Center and Ancient Promises

Jaishree Misra's Ancient Promises tells the story of a Delhi girl who spends summers with grandparents in Kerala. Although she goes to an all girl parochial school, she manages to fall in love with a boy from the connected boys school. When he leaves for three years in England, she is sure she'll never see him again, and acquieces to a proposal from a 'good family' in Kerala that has been looking for a suitable wife for their son. The marriage doesn't go so well in this beautifully written story about families in India.






One Night @ the Call Center by Chetan Bhagat was on the India best seller list. It follows several characters one night (with flashbacks to other times) at a call center in Gaurgon, the tech suburb of New Delhi. It's a glimpse of those now infamous call centers from the other side. While there are comments about the American callers on the other side (they use a 30:10 ratio in the training class to remind the workers to be patient because a 30 year old American has the intelligence of a 10 year old Indian) much of it is about the relationships of the workers, working for a stupid, ambitious boss, and how the good salaries they make entices them to put up with all sorts of humiliations. (Note, this seems to answer a question I had in an earlier post about how much call center workers make. In the book they make 15,000 Rupees per month (about $336).

Bhagat's first book - Five Point Someone - follows three classmates at India's extremely hard to get into Indian Institute of Technology, where students' status is based on the grade level. If you are a Five point something, you are definitely lower caste. This book is less polished than Call Center, but it is an interesting glimpse at life in this exclusive university.