Firstpost

Editor’s Note: 1888 Dial India (Random House, Rs 150) is written by acclaimed comedy writer/scriptwriter, Anuvab Pal, and is a searing satire that captures the pulse of corporate India. Arun Gupta is man with a dream: to create the next Google. No, not a search engine but an American suicide hotline outsourced to Mumbai. Who better to save the lives of depressed Americans than a staff of  Indians ruled by an insane, megalomaniacal boss pretending to be a true-blue Yank.

Anuvab Pal is an acclaimed playwright and screenplay writer. His screenplays include the award winning ‘The Loins of Punjab’ and ‘The President is Coming’. His plays, which have been performed at numerous festivals, include Chaos Theory, Fatwa, Paris and Life, Love, and ETIBDA. Anuvab has also written for the acclaimed sitcoms Frasier and Law and Order. He currently lives and works in Mumbai.

Ten days later, we moved into our offices at the Prestige Business Centre in a pretty important part of Mumbai. Later, I told my secretary, Bhola—yes Bhola my cook—I promoted him, sent him to Anuradha Bhasin’s SPEAKEZYEE English classes, and he’s my PA now. He knows Microsoft, new India, social mobility…if you don’t know what that means, you should read Chetan Bhagat and learn. Anyway, I told Bhola, ‘Look, it doesn’t matter that we are four hours from Nariman Point. The point is that we are facing the west, towards the US, where our market is waiting to die.’ Bhola looked a bit confused but I told him that he’d soon understand.

Most call centres make the fatal mistake of hiring a lot of people at their inception. Look at Tata and ITC. Filled with thousands of 20 year old bastards right from day one without the customer base. I’m not into that. Very soon, you’re burning cash, and I don’t want to go back to Sarah, in my house, wearing my Armani night suit and say, dude, I burnt cash because my office is filled with young people drinking coffee and not enough Americans dying. I want to spend cash and get more cash. It’s a unique business strategy I know, but that’s who I am—unique. So, I thought I would start as a specialist call centre.

I was debating between hiring either twenty-five people or just two people, and I decided on two. It’s like ordering at Mughal Durbar where you can always ask for more roomali roti. My first two employees would be the first two roomali rotis and then I’d get the others hot, instead of them just sitting cold. No, not in a…not sexual… Look, I know what happens to people who are into that okay. Alimony. Soon, they catch you with too much cologne in a four-star B town with thongs and a teenager from Uzbekistan. Or your wife finds some sms about some declined Amex payment to Miss Divine in Bangkok and you get truly fucked. I can’t be into that. I have equity investors.

So I put in a post on Monster.com. The fuckers charged me four thousand bucks for it. Bastards. I’m giving them business, and they’re charging me money for it? Their customer representative, Parvati, tried to explain to me that that’s their business model—commission based—but who do they think I am? Some old fucker who only uses Gmail?

But finally it was up. The ad headline read, ‘Start-up Looking for Self-Starters in Mumbai.’ Clever, right, to use ‘start-up’ and ‘self-starter’ in one sentence? I want people to think that this is a fun place to work. Like Google. They can immediately see that the boss is a funny guy. He puns. And I wanted people to get that. If you don’t get subtlety, you won’t understand the US. Period.

They say our greatest asset is our hundreds of millions of young, educated middle-class. Then why did I get only twelve applications? Anyways, fuck that. I don’t care. I said, when we are bigger than General Electric, I will have twelve people just doing my human resource management. When you’re hiring, always look for how people respond to your ad. That way you immediately get to know who they are. No one will give you this insight. But take it from me.

I picked two to interview because I needed two. That’s a limited choice, you may say. In fact, that’s no choice. If you interview two, you have to hire two. But see, here’s the thing. I screened. I am a screener. Look like a hawk and then hunt like a deer, that’s my hiring tactic.

The first two emailed responses said, ‘Fuck you.’ Now while that might show initiative, drive and leadership, it already shows me that they have no respect for the company email. How would a lady in Utah feel if she got a ‘fuck you’ email just before putting her head in an oven? Not nice. So they were immediately fired. Then this female applicant wrote one little sentence, ‘Are you Sudha?’ This told me two things about the person. One, that she prefers to work for a woman. Two, that she’s using company time to chat with her friend Sudha. Disqualified.

The rest of the responses I couldn’t understand because they were in Telugu and said something about voting for Chiranjeevi.

Then I got to the last two. They really knew what they were doing.

Ramesh18999537@gmail.com said, ‘Sir, I’d like an interview,’ and KoolKattRashmi@bsnl.co.in said, ‘Yes.’

I like her better. Precise and not wasting the boss’s time, even though I didn’t know what she was saying yes to. It didn’t matter. She had my attention with her briefness.

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