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Laveena pulls up in her black Land Cruiser in front of Sheena’s family home in Bangalore. Laveena is the chief financial officer and one of the founders of I2U, a call center across town in the new Technology Park. Laveena has arranged for us to conduct interviews at I2U and was generous enough to pick us up from Sheena’s house on her way to work. We exchange hellos as we make our way to Tech Park, located on the outskirts of the city. Laveena’s driver maneuvers quickly and efficiently through crowded streets, the large vehicle bobbing and weaving as cars communicate through frequent honks. Laveena calmly talks on her BlackBerry to someone in Germany as we pass makeshift housing. Small markets line the road; venders push carts and hawk their goods. The signs to I2U begin to appear about five miles before we reach the call center as the business of the street life gives way to swanky glass buildings, which have sprung up to house multinational corporations like Dell and AOL. High-end housing complexes in various stages of construction are mushrooming along Bangalore’s I.T. corridor, adjacent to numerous matchbox apartments. Billboards promise safe, luxurious living conditions—American style—for I.T. professionals. Even though we are getting further from the center of the city, these apartments are already priced out of the range of most of the agents who work in Bangalore’s numerous call centers. The billboards serve as images of aspiration that might capture agents’ imaginaries, not a reality they might actually attain. Although agents won’t live here, the industry’s middle and upper management will, as will high-end American and other Western employees, who will use these company flats during their stints in the country. vii Preface On the Ground viii preface We pull up to the I2U building. Its exterior is made of glossy blue glass that deepens as it reflects the cloudless sky. The building opens out onto large manicured lawns, well watered by automatic sprinklers. This building could be transplanted into the cityscape of a midwestern American city: the sprawling lawn, the outward expanse of the building, its relative isolation from other buildings. It is a four-story office building with seven other business operations taking up the rest of the building space. This is a very different scenario from Bangalore’s central business district, where buildings crowd each other out on Commercial Street, barely an arm’s length between their exteriors. The luxury of lawns and the expansive architecture of the building signifies a remove from the crowded Bangalore streets we have left behind. It is another space, another world. As we walk through the foyer to the stairs, the building’s glossy first world exterior gives way to less polished innards. Through a veil of blue tarps, we glimpse construction in adjoining offices. Several lean-bodied workers meander through bamboo scaffolding carrying bowls of cement on their heads. The building’s hasty construction reverberates with the sound of loud machinery—jackhammers, electric saws and drills, a cement mixer. The building’s interior is being pieced together as we enter. The forms of labor being done here are divided by the permeable boundary of blue tarps: the informatics labor is cordoned off from this unfinished, behind-the-scenes manual labor. The tarps serve as a veil, demarcating an uneven division of labor taking place on the ground, even as this site is just one of countless centers that are designed in service to the West. Laveena guides us away from the loud, messy construction. “We just moved into these new offices,” she offers by way of an explanation. “I’d hoped the construction would be completed soon because it’s so noisy.” Laveena is a study in paradoxes. Her handshake is firm, but her voice is soft. She dresses in trousers and a kurti, a mix of Western and Indian traditional wear, presenting a deliberately cultivated professional look, but not one that is too concerned with the latest fashion. Of medium height and average build, she has a quick smile and talks at a fast pace, as if her mind runs faster than her mouth. Her ambition to be the best at what she does is anything but average. She is as much at ease negotiating on the phone with clients from all over the world as she is speaking the local language with the parents of one of her agents to put them...

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