In his book, Dead Ringers, Shehzad Nadeem explores the impacts that outsourcing has on sending countries as well as the Indian workers it employs. Through personal interviews and the presentation of his own ideas, Nadeem presents the many perspectives, both positive and negative, through which different people view the outsourcing industry. He focuses primarily on the perspective that outsourcing has Westernized the Indian people as the outsourcing industry in India “frequently requires employees to don Western identities” (Nadeem 2011:7), including names, accents, and lifestyles, when speaking on the phone with customers.
In my opinion, Nadeem puts great effort into ensuring his readers will grasp the abundance of concepts he discusses …show more content…
The Indian employees each craft a new lifestyle according to how the “playwright,” or their supervisor, “wants it to be.” Their new Westernized identities wipe out their former senses of self so that all that is left that actually belongs to them (“what is yours”) is to perform well as Western white-collar service workers (“to play the assigned part well”). An understanding of this universal message enhanced my ability to comprehend the reality of the lives of Indian employees in the outsourcing industry, a reality that was initially so unfamiliar to me that I found it difficult to …show more content…
The beginning of the episode focuses on a group of lower caste Indians who perform funeral pyres upon a fire that they have kept burning for thousands of years. Their continued loyalty to this tradition indicates that the history of India is still greatly valued by many Indian people. I think Nadeem’s generalization discussed in the prior paragraph is very unfair to such people who work hard daily to preserve India’s culture and traditions. When he accused the Indians of disregarding their country’s history, perhaps Nadeem was only referring to the Indians working in the outsourcing industry who have exploited their sudden wealth. Still, he fails to acknowledge this. I feel that Nadeem should have either been more specific about who he is referring to or avoided such a generalization altogether in order to prevent spreading the misconception that Indians no longer value their country’s history and
In my opinion, Nadeem puts great effort into ensuring his readers will grasp the abundance of concepts he discusses …show more content…
The Indian employees each craft a new lifestyle according to how the “playwright,” or their supervisor, “wants it to be.” Their new Westernized identities wipe out their former senses of self so that all that is left that actually belongs to them (“what is yours”) is to perform well as Western white-collar service workers (“to play the assigned part well”). An understanding of this universal message enhanced my ability to comprehend the reality of the lives of Indian employees in the outsourcing industry, a reality that was initially so unfamiliar to me that I found it difficult to …show more content…
The beginning of the episode focuses on a group of lower caste Indians who perform funeral pyres upon a fire that they have kept burning for thousands of years. Their continued loyalty to this tradition indicates that the history of India is still greatly valued by many Indian people. I think Nadeem’s generalization discussed in the prior paragraph is very unfair to such people who work hard daily to preserve India’s culture and traditions. When he accused the Indians of disregarding their country’s history, perhaps Nadeem was only referring to the Indians working in the outsourcing industry who have exploited their sudden wealth. Still, he fails to acknowledge this. I feel that Nadeem should have either been more specific about who he is referring to or avoided such a generalization altogether in order to prevent spreading the misconception that Indians no longer value their country’s history and