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Almost a century ago, Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw said America and England were separated by a common language.
India and the United States, however, are now drawing closer through English and even finding love, according to the latest fictional tale on the globalisation phenomenon of outsourcing.
Neelesh Misra's "Once Upon a Time Zone" brings together characters from Jackson, Mississippi, New York and New Delhi into a picture of globalisation that mixes stern parents, racial issues and love via email and toll-free calls.
English-speaking young people form the backbone of India's rapidly expanding outsourcing industry which adds 17 billion dollars to the economy and employs 700,000 people, making it a bright spot in a country where almost 300 million earn less than a dollar a day.
The industry though has been a hot-button topic with complaints that it exploits young Indian talent into doing a mindless task just to make money and sucks jobs away from the United States.
"I think there have been benefits for both sides from globalisation, particularly outsourcing," says Misra, a journalist who has written non-fiction books on the massacre of the Nepal royal family and the hijacking of an Indian airlines plane to Afghanistan in addition to penning songs for Hindi films.
The story brings love between a middle-class Brahmin named Neel Pandey in New Delhi under pressure by his dad to marry a suitable bride and Puerto Rican news reporter Angela Cruz in New York whose racist father lost his job to an Indian outsourcing entrepreneur.
Along the way there are lesbians, gangsters, a school band formed by special needs students and a visa scam built around a chess tournament.
Neel is crazy about America -- he has posters of the Statue of Liberty in his bedroom, dreams of marrying a woman from the US and is hooked on the music and films of the country.
Angela meanwhile in New York is drawn to the exotic idea of India in a land where marketing quickly homogenizes every new wave.
Neel is not alone in India according to a 2005 survey by the US-based Pew Foundation, a media-focused charity, that found 71 percent of Indians have a favorable view of the United States.
In fact, of the 17 countries polled in the survey, only Americans themselves hold a more favorable view of their country.
"It's an ego thing to know that people in America are highly interested in India now," says Misra, a slim mustachioed 33-year-old originally from the ancient city of Lucknow in northern India, as is Neel.
"I totally identify with Neel. The politics of (President George W.) Bush aside, globalisation and outsourcing have brought the idea of America across to India. That just wasn't the case even five years ago."
Misra is not the first writer to fictionalise the call centre industry in India and its impact on an increasingly prosperous young, educated urban middle class.
This year Chetan Bhaghat, an investment banker with Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong, penned "One Night at the Call Centre," a runaway bestseller in India, that painted a dark picture of overworked youngsters frustrated by the mundane nature of their jobs and the insult of dealing with rude Americans.
New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman weighed in last year on the non-fiction side with "The World is Flat" -- a book critics said seemed to have been a revelation more to the author than to anyone else as he discovers outsourcing a decade after the story hit the world.
But Misra's take, published in English by Harper Collins India, is the first to show how the two cultures of India and the United States, long estranged by Cold War politics, low levels of trade and fear of the superpower, may actually be coming closer through outsourcing.
"On both sides, English is the biggest bridge," Misra says. "Both the protagonists are trying to escape smaller worlds and English-speaking Neel and journalist Cruz use language to do that."
Only a small percentage of India's 1.1 billion population speaks English, but the symbols of America in India and vice versa have boomed, Misra says.
"In small towns in India, you can now get Domino's Pizza or at least a Coke. In the US, Bollywood films, yoga and other symbols are catching on. Even so, this book is not aimed at the Western bookshelf. It's a story basically saying that globalisation works in mysterious ways and in India it is causing a lot to change."
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AFPEntertainment-India-book-globalisation
AFP 041155 GMT 09 06
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