yazadjal.com

I don’t call people stupid or silly, or any person’s arguments idiotic. The reason, as I’ve explained in my scrape with Jivha sometime back, is that if a person’s argument is self-evidently idiotic, then it is redundant to call him as such and it is an insult to my readers’ intelligence to explain why he is an idiot. On the other hand, if I think it is worth my while to try to refute the alleged idiot’s argument, then it is only because I think that there are reasonable people who agree with said alleged idiot. Those people will be put off if I call that person names. They will not read the rest of my argument.

I now have good reason to violate this rule. Two good reasons, in fact.

Firstly I think it is a worthwhile project started by Ankh to googlebomb Praful Bidwai as the Resident Idiot.

Secondly, the resident idiot says things that ought to be self-evidently dumb, but people still continue to treat him as if he is sane.

No seriously, take this

In the 1930s, Indian Communists (who then belonged to the Indian unit of the British Communist Party; the Communist Party of India wasn’t formed yet) opposed Gandhiji’s swadeshi movement on the ground that workers in Manchester would lose their jobs. I didn’t think that anyone in this day and age could possibly replicate that stunt. But the Resident Idiot manages it. He mourns the loss of American and British jobs to Indians.

And do you notice how glibly the phrase “low paid” slips off his tongue, but the fact that this “low pay” would probably place those employees in the top 5% of Indians income-wise doesn’t?

And do you notice his elitism? No? Then read this:

“Very large numbers of them suffer from a range of ailments - for instance sleeplessness, serious depression, ear infections - so you have a very high rate of [staff] turnover.”

Except for ear-infections, the other ailments are a result of working nights. Now these call centre guys aren’t the only Indians working nights are they? Factory employees working night shifts, security guards, auto-walas - just some professions I can recall off the top of my mind. That’s okay with Bidwai I presume. But how horrifying that young, educated, middle-class guys actually work nights!

And “so you have a high rate of turnover” - If the Resident Idiot had actually bothered to check, he’d have found that most of the turnover consists of people quitting one call centre and joining other, because the competition is so much in the industry.

But of course, the Resident Idiot doesn’t really bother to think, let alone check his facts. If he had, he would have wondered how he could reconcile his assertion that the call centres are exploiting the desperate jobless youth with the fact of the high turnover - which implies that the employees have some choice. Which, once again is more than most Indians have - but that’s okay with the Resident Idiot. He is only concerned with the young educated and middle-class.

The poor exploited call-centre employees are no different from sweatshop employees -except for that they work with computers and electronic equipment in an air-conditioned office, with salaries that would place them in the top tier of the population and they have a choice of jobs which enables them to hop jobs every few months.

And do you notice how not just the Resident Idiot but virtually every critic of the BPO phenomenon misrepresents BPO as “call centres”? The phenomenon is not just a bunch of fresh college graduates making sales calls. There are also network engineers fixing problems, medical transcriptionists working normal hours, GE centres doing the paperwork, equity analysts doing research.

Some of these are high-value jobs. Some are low-end, but will employ many people. Some require you to work odd hours. Some rely on the time difference, and you have to work normal Indian hours for them. Some of these are essentially temporary (Process migration experts - will become redundant after a few years because all processes will have been migrated) some are permanent. Some will soon be automated, some will always require human skill. The same as in any other industry really

But trust the Resident Idiot to pick only those that suit his thesis.
Such things make you wonder whether he is in fact shilling for American and British unions who are concerned about job losses. But let’s give him the benefit of doubt. Let’s just call him a useful Resident Idiot.