Acting American

What's happening inside those Indian call centers?

Personality transformations!

Nikki, Osmond, and Nicholas epitomize the American spirit -- they are hard-working, career obsessed and driven by consumer desires. But in reality, this isn't how they started life -- all have new personas that they have adopted as part of their jobs in India's call centers. Before adopting their new American skins, they were Vandana, Oaref and Nikesh. Teachers armed with catalogs and snapshots of shopping malls helped them to adopt Western personalities in order to make them more successful call center workers.

Americans and Europeans are unhappy that local call center jobs have been relocated to lower wage countries, and the more Western the call center workers seem, the less likely they are to get any friction from the other end of the line. The call center workers are the subjects of Indian filmmaker Ashim Ahluwalia's new documentary "John & Jane Toll Free," which puts faces to the voices Europeans and Americans often get when they call customer service and are patched through to an Indian call center.

The film recently screened at the Berlin International Film Festival and will run in New York later this month and eventually on the cable channel HBO in the United States.It's estimated that 400,000 Indians are employed by the multi-billion dollar call center industry, where they serve as a telephone-wielding army standing by to answer questions and complaints from consumers in the United States and Britain. India's educated, English-speaking workforce has been a big draw for business process outsourcing, or 'BPO' firms, and economists point to call centers as one of the success stories of globalization.

More here.