John and Jane

I've recently developed a sense of pity for many of my friends who work in call centers. As far as I can see, this one is the most sickening jobs in the world. You get paid a nice lump, but underneath that, you get a suction needle stuck right into your nerves, your mind, your psyche. Everything about the job reeks of an unhappy career, starting with a new name, an alias for you, well in this case:John and Jane. Directed by Ashim Ahluwalia.

Chances are that if you live in the West and you call an airline or credit card company your call will be routed to a call centre in India. The agents who work there are the subjects of a new film called 'John & Jane'.

This film profiles six agents working in a Mumbai call centre whom we see at home and at work, where they spend hours on the phone talking to customers in America.

The film is an observational study of a new breed of workers and it looks at their lives, not the facts and figures that detail call centre costs and productivity

The idea of John and Jane is based on the aliases these characters have to have. Everyone has to have an American name that an American caller would feel comfortable with, so when you first join a call centre you get asked to pick an alias and that becomes your American identity.

The film is divided into three parts - the first two characters don't really like the job and Sidney actually wants to be a Bollywood dancer. He doesn't really want to be working the call centre; his English isn't really very good, so he's perpetually getting the phone slammed down on him. He's just disgusted with the job and he wants to be doing something very different, whereas the second set of characters and the last set of characters are actually getting more and more into the American universe.

Some of the workers profiled in the film feel used and abused, and call centres have been called modern day sweatshops. The productivity of the workers is aggressively monitored and the workers also have to tolerate racial abuse from American and British callers. The film shows lifts the veil on some of these less pleasant aspects of the job.