1-800- worlds

This book is all about exploring a way of life embedded in a mode of work which has several forms of complications and entanglements. The book does not come up with any value-oriented arguments regarding call centre work and the economy and lifestyle fostered by it.  The alterations happened in the way Indian middle class approached certain kind of labour and its aesthetics is explained very well in this book, especially from the era of the 1990s. According to the author, if we dig out for an argument, she noted that how flexibility became a 'necessary caveat for upward mobility' to an aspiring class of young urban Indians who are at the peak in demography. The author also points out how this flexible economy enabled by IT and BPO related works became historical markers of Indian middle-class-ness.  as a cultural and linguistically nation like India, this particular kind of flexible economy unified the dreams and suffering of professional, undergraduate bulk of Indian youth. One of the signifying result produced by the author is regarding the nightlife of these young workers and their class composition, which can be defined as the new middle class.  According to the author, one of the key juncture for this techno boom was created by the pressure of the Indian middle class, who are products of the colonial legacy.  The author perfectly states that “over the 1990s, this class has also increasingly pushed for economic reform as an antidote to the failures of the Indian state. The resultant increasing pace of development has delivered a paradoxical reward. Even as the Indian middle class now enjoys the consumerist lifestyle afforded by free-market ideology, it must work harder to define its own cultural boundaries that are being rapidly subsumed by socio-economically equal new middle classes. This book is an ethnographic exploration of the material and symbolic processes that underlie this controversial middle-class expansion and locates call centres within this socio-political milieu.

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