Arjun Raina Inserts Empathy in Global Capitalism

India and China have become the latest demons among certain politicians and economic analysts in the United States. The argument in these circles is that tens of thousands of white-collar and high tech U. S. workers are unemployed because their jobs have been outsourced to comparably skilled workers in India and China who offer their labor at substantially lower cost. Just as the commentators of the 1970s and 1980s generated inflammatory rhetoric and television images of destruction against the Japanese automobile industry, the opinion makers of the early 21st century have identified their own Asian villains.

The offshore call center business, situated primarily in India, is a peculiar subset of the outsourcing phenomenon—“peculiar” because it combines profit with theatrical performance, cost-cutting with identity transformation. The U. S. and other western multinationals of the retail and service industry (insurance and credit card companies, for example) save millions of dollars on customer service; the Indian call center employees become “virtual” Americans—right down to adopting a western name, speaking with the appropriate accent, being familiar with U. S. television shows and sports, and even being able to talk about the weather. The Indian call center employees are Americans by night (to accommodate the 9.5 – 10.5 hours time difference between the two nations, India being ahead) and their Indian selves by day. An odd kind of transaction operates in this offshore service business, a transaction predicated on the fiction that the customer in the United States is being serviced by a U. S. located service worker. A “theatrical” performance unfolds in every call, and the success of the performance depends on the customer’s not having the slightest clue that s/he has, in essence, “witnessed” a fine piece of acting.

Actor and dramatist Arjun Raina, who as a call center trainer has prepared workers to assume their American identities, creates a compelling solo performance piece in “A Terrible Beauty is Born”* where he plays two roles—that of an Indian male call center employee and an elderly woman in the United States. Two lives come together, but not, as is usually the case, for the limited purpose of a business transaction. In Raina’s script, two individuals connect to restore meaning and purpose to one another. Through these characters, Raina infuses an economic phenomenon with the urgency of personal and shared emotion.

Ashok Mathur, the call center worker, assumes the American name and persona John Small; as John Small he calls Elizabeth, the elderly credit card holder in the United States. Payments are overdue and the card has been used beyond its limit. It’s time to pay, John declares, using an effective mix of cajoling, firmness, reprimand, and persistent badgering. Elizabeth is vulnerable and experiencing her own personal trauma: the card is being used by her daughter, whose name she and her husband have added to their account.

The daughter, a single mother with a young baby girl and living in New York City, has had a tense relationship with her parents. She runs up their credit card bill, and the last time they spoke with her they let her know that they were not pleased. Since then, she has neither called nor used the credit card. Elizabeth and her husband have not heard from their daughter since the events of September 11, 2001. They have no way of knowing if she is safe. In John Small the credit card collector, Elizabeth discerns an opportunity to trace her daughter, to satisfy herself that she is at least alive if not willing to reconnect with her parents.

Ashok, meanwhile, is enclosed in his own trauma. A co-worker has committed suicide. We are never really informed of the cause, but it appears that something about this phantom life of being a call center worker and making one’s living pretending to be who one is not is deeply disturbing. Among the Indian call center employees, cultural schizophrenia is emerging as a serious problem. S success in the performance of being a virtual American is not the success attending a skilled actor, whose capacity to take on the attitudes and urgencies of diverse individuals is on display, recognized as performance, and, therefore, valued as art. By contrast, the call center worker’s success lies in erasing all trace of performance, any hint of the artificial. Her performance takes place in a shadow world, not for the adulation of crowds but for the benefit of boardrooms and shareholders who care not a whit for one’s daily transformation into another being. This is the relentless obscurity and anonymity that, we are led to surmise, Ashok Mathur’s coworker exits when she takes her life.

John Small has a job to do, however: he has to impress upon Elizabeth that she must make the payments on the card. She has a more urgent concern. Desperate, Elizabeth pleads with John to call her the minute there is any activity on the card. That way, she will have proof of her daughter’s being alive.

Through the figure of Elizabeth, Raina takes the call center phenomenon out of the realm of the purely economic and transports it to the plane of maternal anguish. In the Indian context, not only does he caution against the dangers of cultural schizophrenia in the suicide of Ashok Mathur’s coworker, but also he interrogates the very notion of “American.” How does one envision an American, Mathur muses, and in that question invokes the history of the Civil Rights movement and its implications for American identity. As an actor, Raina’s skill is evident from the moment the play opens with his performance as Elizabeth. The shifting back and forth between Elizabeth and John Small and between John Small and Ashok Mathur is seamless. Equally impressive is the script he has fashioned by creating characters that share a deeply moving experience of cross-national and cross-cultural empathy. Two individuals who never see one another face to face nevertheless come together in their conversations of anxiety, loss, and grief. In Raina’s “A Terrible Beauty is Born,” the Indian worker is not the thief “stealing” the job of the deserving American, but the fellow human whose help is essential to the peace of mind of the American.