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	The day we went to Bangalore Author: Shaun Micallef Date: 24/08/2002 Words: 1064 Publication: The Age Section: Saturday Extra Page: 2 I recently got myself a call-centre. My friends had been complaining about always getting my answering machine when they called and my accountant pointed out that cheap human contact could be purchased by the minute from a little out-of-the-way Export Processing Zone he knew somewhere in the Maharashtra region of Western India. Mr C had been looking after my financial affairs for years, having first impressed me back in the '70s when, just before Poseidon went bust, he rang and told me to sell all my shares to my infirm mother. It saved me millions and he had made a client for life. He recommended that I interview candidates for the job personally and that he accompany me on my trip as a chaperone, man-servant and guide. ``India is not Melbourne," he warned me accurately, and then rang off muttering something about tax deductions. Our 747 touched down in Bombay much to the surprise of all, not least the Bombay Harbour Master who had to row us to shore. I wanted to tip the man, but Mr C counselled against it, saying that it would create an unhealthy precedent. ``You don't know this city like I do," he hissed as I reached my forefinger into my fob pocket and then had to pretend I was just checking my fly buttons. Ah, but what a city! Bombay had come a long way since it first formed part of Catherine of Bragaza's dowry to Charles II to create the unshakable alliance between Portugal and Britain (which persists to this day). Gone were the 16th-century wall calendars, the Dutch East India Company head office, and the traditional volcano-eating contest - but these were changes not for the better, I fear. Back in the days before we all became terraced houses side-by-side in the global village, one knew where one stood - be it firmly on the neck of another, or in a closed bear trap clutching one's bleeding ankle. My sojourn to India had a dual purpose. While I was there - or here, depending on when I wrote this - I also hoped to bump into Sajit Ray and see if he could read my film script. I couldn't make head or tail of it myself, having printed it out in hypertext by mistake. As it turned out, our paths did not cross in the 14 metres between the jetty and the taxi rank. Perhaps he was abroad. The impudent cad. But all that, or the lack of it, lay ahead of us. We hailed a mongoose-drawn hansom cab (a thousand of the shrieking vermin lashed together, as in the days of yore) and took to the teeming streets; specifically the unsurfaced road to Bangalore where life was cheap but Mr C said he could talk them down even further. It was only 3500 kilometres to the mud-spattered outskirts of Karnataka but at the speed our driver was travelling it was going to take hours. He turned to us and apologised in broken Hindi, saying it was his first day and that the traffic was never this thick in his native Wodonga. Slow going it might have been but when I looked out the grimy window and saw the Gangorti glacier overtaking us and laughing, I suggested we get out and walk. Mrs Venkataraman lived in a cardboard lean-to with her 12 leprous children in the justifiably unfashionable Latin quarter of east Bangalore, and for the last year she had been answering the phones for an Australian bank and law firm. She was 93 but had the speaking voice of someone two-thirds that age. Polite, as informative as the PR kits would allow and, with a good line in faking sincerity, she had it all. Mrs Venkataraman had known poverty there was no doubt. Before becoming a call centre she had cleaned rocks for a multi-national mining company. Every morning she would take the rocks down to the banks of the Brahaputra and flick them spotless with the sleeves of freshly laundered jibbahs. It beat selling your intestines to rich Englishmen for use as cummerbunds, as her grandfather had done in the days of the Raj, but only just. I wanted to give her a coin, but again Mr C stayed my hand. ``Are you mad?" he rasped, tightening his grasp on my wrist until it almost snapped. ``These people wouldn't accept a hand-out if you gave it to them. What they need is work." He was right, of course. I was being shamefully colonial in my attitude. Were Mahatma Ghandi alive to see it, he would have flown into a rage and probably beaten me to death with that walking stick of his - and who could blame him? (This is a rhetorical question). As my friend negotiated with the old woman, I looked about her modest hovel. Squatting on a raffia mat in the corner was a phalanx of her children - some as young as three months - hand sewing a hillock of plimsolls. The workmanship was appalling. ``Half a rupee a month and that's my final offer!" bellowed my accountant with an imperiousness unusual in a man who so resembled a tennis ball. I felt he was being unnecessarily cruel and uncompromising, but he did have everyone's best interests at heart, particularly mine, so I kept my own counsel. In any event, Mrs Venkataraman was in no position to horse trade, cowering as she was on the floor covered in cobras, which fanged her with the rapidity of overlockers. The deal was done. We left her with a PABX switchboard and 300 pages of biographical material (rented by her at a nominal fee), and hopped the glacier back to town. Back home on Terra Australis as I sorted my mail (Sajit Ray had dropped by in my absence and left his card) and modelled my souvenir dhoti before my parrots (who couldn't have been less interested), I mused on how fortunate we were to be living in a country where we could hive off so many of life's annoyances - like talking to our friends and manufacturing - to slave labour on the subcontinent. Truly, we were the lucky country. That night, I rang the call-centre to try it out, but it was engaged.