1-800-Worlds

This book is concerned with the labour practices, life-worlds, and media atmospheres of Indian call centre workers, and locates the call centre economy within the socio-political context of the new Indian middle classes. Through a thick description of the nightly and daily routines of transnational Indian call centre workers, it reads the call centre world as a set of indicators to understand changing forms of urban Indian middle-classness. The book is based on twenty-one months of ethnographic research in Pune, a prominent university town, and investigates how young men and women between the ages of 18 and 25 became the ideal worker population for the call centre industries. The book engages with subjects who work through the night, sleep during the day, and listen to foreign voices in accented tongues over transnational telephone connections, in order to understand the simultaneous spectrality and bodily intelligibility of their lives.