That's the latest edition in the outsourced-to-India story, as harried Westerners get “remote assistants” in Bangalore and elsewhere to manage their lives for them - the boring and worrisome bits, that is.
BANGALORE: We run business processes for them, say prayers on their behalf and complete their class work. About time, then, that we conducted their daily lives as well. That's the latest edition in the outsourced-to-India story, as harried Westerners get “remote assistants” in Bangalore and elsewhere to manage their lives for them - the boring and worrisome bits, that is.
From reading bedtime stories to children a world away and booking tickets for a football match, to organising office work and even arguing with a spouse or a boss, these remote assistants are helping the clients of their companies eliminate the mundane and clear the clutter in the everyday business of living.
Companies such as the Bangalore-based Get Friday, Your Man In India (YMI) and Brickwork Analyst offer the services of personal assistant for residents in the US, Britain and a few other countries. Among the chores these assistants handle are travel, accommodation and dinner reservations, online shopping, organising parties and transcribing office documents.
The idea of call-centre workers in India taking care of tedious tasks for America’s well-heeled has resonated strongly enough for Hollywood to take note.
A movie is being made there on the real-life experiences of a man, AJ Jacobs, who outsourced his life to India, so to speak. The movie is being directed by Jay Roach (of Meet the Parents fame).
Jacobs hired two personal assistants from Bangalore, Asha Sarella from Get Friday and Honey Balani of Brickwork Analyst, in August this year. Among the ‘jobs’ they did for him was argue with his wife and read a bedtime story to Jasper, Jacobs’s son.
“The trickiest thing Jacobs wanted me to do was fight with his wife, Julie, apparently because she had scolded him for being forgetful,” says Sarella. “He wanted me to remind her that she herself had forgotten numerous things in the past.”
Balani was also assigned personal work by Jacobs, an editor with Esquire. He also made her research for him an article about the ‘sexiest woman alive” , not to mention reminding his boss about a story idea.
“My assistants saved me a lot of time; I got to catch up on my TV and reading,” says Jacobs, who continues to outsource work to Get Friday. “On the flipside, I couldn’t outsource things like going to dinner with my father-in-law.”
Sarella says handling Jacobs and his demands was easier than the client who followed, a British journalist called John-Paul Flintoff. “The work was tougher still because, unlike Jacobs, he wanted everything done within 24 hours,” she says. Flintoff got Sarella to order tickets for a Test match, get in touch with old friends, locate a piano store nearby, even buy underpants.
Jacobs got to know of India’s outsourcing story from Thomas L Friedman’s The World is Flat, the bestseller that charts the country’s rise and rise as an IT power. Given the satisfaction Jacobs and others like him have found, India may have found a new niche in the outsourcing success story. Life, after all, is an everyday business.
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