is a fascinating documentary that looks into the international call centre culture that has sprung up in this city of 15 million on India's west coast.
Montreal filmmakers Ben Addelman and Samir Mallal spent a year following the lives of several talented, well-educated young Indians as they put university places and high-flying careers on hold to earn far bigger bucks on commission trying to sell gas and phone services to strangers thousands of miles away.
Addelman and Mallal look at the backgrounds of the telemarketers, some of whom gave up scientific or law careers to earn more money than their parents ever did. Confident, hard living and business oriented, these young people are initially super successful and expect to achieve much in a call centre "career".
But as time goes on, the competition from places like the Philippines get tougher (ie. cheaper and faster) and the weary voices on the other end of the lines in Europe and America have learned how to get rid of pesky cold callers. The job in Bombay becomes harder and harder to carry out.
Their boss is Kas Lalani, the CEO of a small British outsourcing firm called Epicentre, who has been working hard to cash in on the global gold rush of telemarketing jobs from the West. Bombay provides him with access to ambitious, English-speaking young adults eager to get ahead and willing to sacrifice almost anything to do it. Lalani constantly worries about the bottom line and being undercut by competitors in even cheaper parts of the world. He is remarkably open about how he uses his staff and his expectations of profit - and he looks like he could have a coronary any minute.
Along with these interesting personalities, Bombay, or Mumbai as it is more commonly called these days, is also a star. The city is shot in loving detail and the richness and harshness of life there is very much evident.
Another impressive aspect of this film is in showing how the global technological workplace is combined with a corporate cutthroat competitiveness that is played out in the lives of these young people.
Check out this film if you're interested in how international businesses take investment and plunge it into the cheapest country available in order to maximize returns - and how one community deals with the changes wrought by this culture. Oh, and the story is good, too.
