McMansions in Bangalore powered by the Indian tech boom may now be topping the $200K mark. That’s ~$600K, adjusted for buying power. According to a woman from Portland now working in Bangalore:

… we went to visit two of my colleague’s new homes that are being built… I was shocked to see the model of the contemporary home; it looked like it came straight out of San Diego, Rancho Cucamonga area. It resembled a typical Southern California cookie cutter home. I was amazed to see that here. Those homes cost [Rs.] 1 crore… I cannot wait to see this place 10 year from now.

Bangalore is aping SoCal now? I’ve got some new tunes in my woofers. Bangalifornia… knows how to party. Just hit the east side of the IIT, on a mission tryin’ to find Mr. Varun-ji. Regulators! Stand down.

The NYT had more last year:

Snigdha Dhar sat in the echoing emptiness of her new home, her husband off at work, her 7-year-old son prattling on about Pizza Hut. The weather outside was California balmy. Children rode bicycles on wide smooth streets. Construction workers toiled on more villas like hers – white paint, red roofs, green lawns – and the community center’s three pools…

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DJ’s in Philadelphia are not alone in lobbing verbal assaults at Indian call center agents. Industry executives and analysts say abusive hate calls are commonplace, and a primary cause of workplace stress. The Washington Post reports:

Rohail Manzoor thought he had what it took to work in a telephone call center. All he had to do was pick up the phone and answer queries from American customers about their long-distance bills. He was armed with lessons on how to speak English like the Americans — adjust the r’s, say “zee” instead of “zed,” “mail” instead of “post.”

He even called himself “Jim,” and figured he would pretend to be an American customer service agent.

But nothing prepared him for the shower of curses that came his way when he picked up the phone one night on the job.

“‘You Indians suck!’ an American screamed on the phone,” recalled a soft-spoken Manzoor, 25. “He was using a lot of four-letter words, too. He called me names left, right and center.”

As a result, some call centers now offer classes on stress-management, meditation, breathing, yoga, and even how to be more American:

Industry watchers say some call centers have giant TV screens showing the weather in different U.S. cities, the scores from latest New York Knicks game or news about the latest play on Broadway. The agents use the information on the screen to make small talk with the caller and mask their location in India.

The training given to the call center aspirants not only involves diction, but also a crash course in American culture. Maneesh Ahooja, a voice and accent trainer for call center employees in Bombay, often makes them watch popular TV shows such as “Friends” and “Dharma and Greg.”

Obviously, part of the problem is with the training itself. After all, when was “Dharma and Greg” ever considered popular? And does anyone really ask about the score of the Knicks game? These days, isn’t it safe to assume that they’re losing? Of course, most of the problem, say executives, finds its source in American anger over outsourcing, and Jason Alexander.

The Washington Post: India call centers suffer storm of 4-letter words (Free registration required)

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An Indian airline is now worth more than American Airlines and United Airlines combined. Jet Airways’ IPO on the Bombay stock exchange last Friday was like a hipster concert: sold out in ten minutes and 50% oversubscribed (via Varnam and Winds of Change). The ~$400M IPO (~$1.2B in buying power) values the company at ~$2.2B at a price-to-earnings multiple of 21.5. That’s a higher valuation than NASDAQ darling JetBlue ($1.9B), American Airlines ($1.5B), Delta ($653M) and the bankrupt United ($142M), but lower than Southwest ($11B).

Meanwhile, the airline with ridiculously attentive service just got clearance to fly New York to Bombay starting in April. The route stops in Brussels, which is my nominee for having the most useless currency left over after a layover, the Belgian franc. Also thanks to the open skies agreement, state carrier Air-India can now fly out of San Francisco.

It’s not clear whether Jet’s bought the JFK landing slots yet, but I’m so looking forward to flying Jet again. And if they ever launch a discount airline, they can nick the sobriquets of the American carriers, calling it Tedwinder or Gana. Like United’s discount cousin, they could chop off the first part of their name and just call it T; or, since they’re a transport company, maybe even T Mobile.

With desis’ legendary respect for intellectual property, it might even fly 😉

Previous post on Jet Airways here.

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Instead of having your desi tunes illegally copied @ the local grocery store, you can now get an online store to do it for you –

San Francisco, Feb 4 : A California company has launched what it calls the first online music download store dedicated to music from India and the Indian sub-continent. CrimsonBay offers music from premiere Indian labels such as Saregama India Ltd, Ishq Records, Yatra Communications and others. The online marketplace, which is similar to Apple’s hugely successfully music download business iTunes, carries over 40,000 songs. A company press release said currently it was offering Hindi content including memorable songs from films such as “Umrao Jaan”, “Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge”, “Aradhana” and artists such as Kishore Kumar, Lata Mangeshkar, Bally Sagoo and Rishi Rich. It plans to update its catalogue regularly.

As before, I suppose there’s a chance that music purchased from CrimsonBay will end up compensating the original artists, but call me a skeptic. Continue reading →

Not too long ago, a friend and I made our way to a nice movie theater in Los Angeles, Calif. And by nice, I mean the kind of theater that brutally charges more for tickets on weekends, and has an overpriced boutique shop in the lobby. Other than that, it was the same as any other not-quite-as-nice theater.

The boutique shop had a section with South Asian-inspired products. This was especially interesting to me because of the noticeable rise in the commercial utilization of the culture. Besides the standard new age fare — incense, books, teas — there were a couple of products that caught my eye. A candle bust of Siddhartha (struck me as a tad sadistic), and a pair of greeting cards from J&M Martinez, which are pictured to the right.

It looks like they’re trying to depict Hindu Gods, but I don’t have a clue about which ones they’re supposed to be. The blue-skinned male on the left could be Krishna, Ram or Shiva, but none of them were that fat. The female on the right could be Lakshmi, but doesn’t she have another pair of arms? Am I completely leaving someone out? And what are the inscriptions all about?

In the end, and especially after noticing the exorbitant price tag, all I could remark to my friend was, “what the f–k?!” They rolled their eyes, as if to suggest that they didn’t care. I would be forced to allow the confusion to consume me as we walked away, enrage me during a trip to the cash-draining snack counter, and finally choke me with a sanity-busting froth during an endless stream of mind-numbing trailers. Thankfully, the two-hour borefest that followed put me to sleep and out of my misery. Still, please help me make sense of my cardstock nemeses. Or at least help me make sense of this senseless post.

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I’m putting out a call to desi college students in the Philly area: come up with a list of companies that advertise on Power 99’s Star and Buc Wild show.

Why? Well, let’s take a little tour through social science, an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one.

First stop: Anthropology

Anthropology directs our attention to the use of discourse in the construction of meaning. Huh? In simpler language, Anthropology teaches us to listen closely, not just to what somebody is saying but to how they say it.

Everybody? Get out your Turbanhead.coms, we’re going to do a close reading:

Community-affairs director Loraine Ballard Morrill, is quoted as saying “Essentially [we’re] apologizing for things on our Web site that were racially inflammatory and insensitive, saying, ‘We took it off our Web site and it won’t happen again.’ ” She said the more serious matter was posting the clip on the Web site. “That probably made it a much more – just a worse situation. Then people could click on it and hear it. That was not cool… . He made a big ol’ mistake in judgment.” [snip] Secondly, the Inquirer story tries to diminish the scope of the problem by taking Morrill’s word that “Most of the e-mails came from people who do not listen to Power 99, whose audience is mainly African American. What does the demographics or geographic location of the offended have to do with this offending clip?

Let’s try to answer Turbanhead here. Why is Power99 apologizing for putting the clip on the web rather than for having recorded it in the first place? Why do they keep mentionining that the people complaining are not their listeners?

I think their language reveals their notion of “fairness.” In their world, a company’s job is to make its audience laugh. In their minds, there would have been nothing wrong if the skit had simply aired as planned, heard mainly by their on air listeners. The mistake was putting the clip on the web, and exposing it to a broader audience who might be offended by it. That is, they’re not sorry they did it, they’re sorry we’re offended. They’re trying to be gracious.

You see something similar when they protest that we aren’t their regular listeners. They don’t think it’s fair that we, who are not their core audience, are getting upset. They’ve done their job, namely entertaining their audience. We shouldn’t be butting in. The fact that they butted into our realm by calling India, using lewd language and threats is not really of importance to them. They can call India, but we can’t call Philly, home of M.Knight himself. Continue reading →