Winter 2006 Alumnae Quarterly Web Extra
Global Outsourcing
The documentary Nalini By Day – Nancy By Night by Sonali Gulati ’96 was screened at the Margaret Mead Film Festival at the Natural History Museum in New York City this past November. The film, which integrates animation and live film footage, examines the economic and cultural issues raised by call centers in India – current flashpoints for the debate over globalization and the outsourcing of jobs from the Untied States to other countries.
Gulati was in film school at Temple University, Philadelphia, a few years ago when she got a strange telemarketing call. Gulati, who is now a documentary filmmaker and assistant professor of film at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond., Va., was surprised that the caller pronounced her name correctly.
The caller, who said her name was “Nancy” and spoke in an American accent, was sitting in a call center in Gulati’s hometown of New Delhi, working nights to call North Americans during the dinner hour, while Gulati herself, with an Indian name and accent, was in the U.S., and they were both “living on Eastern Standard Time,” Gulati says. She “thought it would be worth exploring creatively.”
To make her film, Gulati went to New Delhi for four months, part of which was just spent trying to gain access into a call center. Both General Electric and American Express have set up their own call centers in India, and are “very skeptical of the media,” says Gulati. She was able to film in an Indian-owned call center doing outsourced work for U.S. companies such as CompuServe. When she returned to the States, “suddenly it was in the news,” she says – Indian call centers were a hot topic, and her film took off.
