Thursday, March 02, 2006

Color us Indian

Indian as a ‘color’ took a seat on an American bus about the same time outsourcing empowered us with enough funds to buy a ticket to ride. It’s when skinhead attacks begin to emerge from the so-far friendly Russian snows, that one must begin to wonder if we are not doing enough to package our third world accounts in first world banks, better.

American outbursts were hardly unexpected, given the history of prejudice and serial attempts at keeping out Asians through bills in the early half of the 20th century. Aftershocks of the anti-Japanese sentiment of the 80s and 90s, directed towards Japanese workers ‘stealing’ Detroit’s auto industry, is still not all gone. Toyota’s April meet with a declining General Motors saw the Japanese giant express fears that their rise against GMs wane would spark a racial backlash. Unwilling to revisit the difficult decades, Toyota urged workers to put their heads down and do their best to not be caught out on any count. It is ignorance to ignore history, and folly to discount chances of its repetition.

Indian BPO workers who started the boom have clogged portals with individual instances of racism—ranging from tones of voice, and snide comments to more direct rebukes of work and person for no apparent reason. BPOs have worked hard at training employees to be culturally, grammatically, and politically correct when dealing with foreign clients, and in the method of dealing with potential racists without cost to company profit. These efforts have been backed by concerted efforts at the level of the ministry of IT and NASSCOM, who have played cultural ambassadors as much as strategic economists.

The fact of the ‘I was Bangalored’ T-shirt one-liner has become a symbol not merely of the angst, but the undercurrent of humour that the effort has managed to generate. That and the IITian Asok of Dilbert fame, tangentially pinpoint the stray streams of goodwill India still holds, as opposed to outright resentment. So much for the countries we outsource to.

The new frontier that public diplomacy needs to tackle must go beyond these countries where the gold mines lie. India’s cultural diplomats now need to address the growing concerns of countries like China and Russia that rival and seek to emulate India’s success at outsourcing. Recognising and if possible aligning with parallel streams of equally cheap labour and streamlined talent could be a start. Symptoms of the feverish sentiment need to be treated with a healthy dose of diplomacy, stylish propaganda, and a slap-on-the-back reminder that former friends can be the best allies in the war against racism.

No comments: