Oracle of outsourced souls

Ashim Ahluwalia’s John and Jane — exploring the Faustian world of call centre employees — is simply brilliant, says Meenakshi Shedde.

 

 

Iranian feature films like Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up so dexterously mix documentary and fiction like milk and sugar, it is hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. But Ashim Ahluwalia’s John and Jane—a documentary on call centre employees—explores the penumbra between documentary and hyperreality, suspended between dream and what he calls ‘tropical science fiction’.

 

John and Jane, one of the most brilliant Indian documentaries in recent times, has been selected for the Berlin International Film Festival’s International Forum of New Cinema section. It is a masterly follow-up to his Thin Air, on Mumbai magicians, which won the Best Film Award at the Film South Asia festival in Nepal. John and Jane is savage, vitriolic, funny, shocking—and a terrifying oracle on the consequences of globalisation. It is truly appalling that the film, also shown at the Toronto festival, was rejected by the Mumbai International Film Festival that opens next month. Fortunately, it will be screened on February 19 at the Russian Cultural Centre during the Experimenta festival.

 

Focussing on outsourcing—the raw nerve of globalisation—it follows the lives of call centre employees (‘call agents’) working on American daytime—Indians by day and Americans by night. The call agents are not merely taught American twangs, but brainwashed about the great American dream. It’s a Faustian deal—as their purses fatten, their souls empty out. Many are filled with self-loathing and loathing for India. After fantasising about fancy villas and vroom vroom bikes, they edge past dark patli gullies to dank homes, nagging mothers and dal chawal. One agent wails, “I don’t want to be an Indian any more!” A girl who has conned some American with her sales babble, believes: “You want to be there for people, it’s so beautiful.” It’s terrifying.

 

Still, nothing prepares you for the fair, blonde ‘cyborg’ Naomi, a call centre employee who stubbornly refuses to identify with the Namrata Pravin Parekh she was born. She doesn’t merely dream of going to America: in her head, she is American already. What started with changing her accent, has taken over her name, body and personality—and devoured her soul. “I’m totally very Americanised…I just love to be the me of myself,” she drawls. But admits, everyone asks, “Where are you from?” It is one of the many heartbreaking moments in the film—especially as she doesn’t seem to have the answer.

 

The film is as much about fractured identities and cultural imperialism as the Stockholm Syndrome, in which victims become sympathetic to their captors. As Cameron Bailey of  the Toronto festival put it, “It is an astonishing look at the souls of the outsourced.”

 

Ahluwalia is not judgemental of his characters. Produced by Future East Film, this 83 minute film was shot on 35mm. With empathetic camerawork by KU Mohanan, the film is deftly edited by Ahluwalia himself. As geography becomes history, Ahluwalia asks hair-raising questions about what it means to be Indian.