Numbers don't tell a story at all

There's a saying that numbers don't tell the full story.

58,000 American soldiers died in Vietnam, which traumatized us for two generations. But the Vietnamese lost two million people—10% of their population. We claimed they placed a lower value on human life, thereby making the senseless slaughter more acceptable. Much of American foreign policy still flows from our humiliation in Vietnam. The “we’re number one” breast-beating of the Reagan era was clearly compensation. And Bush Senior’s testy desire for a “statute of limitiations” regarding Vietnam was apparently another way of saying that we should be free to engage in more wrong-headed imperial ventures.

Now America’s hawks want the rest of the world to pay for the trauma of 9/11. In typical American fashion, we have commercialized this to the point of nausea, and turned it into a political weapon. Many outside the U.S. who bore the brunt of war and terror during the 20th century—too much of it instigated by the U.S.—hoped this tragedy would lead us to look for the true sources of terror. As Indian novelist Arundhati Roy put it, the world sympathized with our tragedy, but they also said to us, “in the gentlest, most human way: ‘Welcome to the World’.”

Or that a million deaths is a statistic. I'm not sure what that makes two million.

Found American Myopia: The View from Abroad looking for info on Arundhati Roy.

This was a mistake.

Spectramind sounds like a front for a Bond villain's evil empire, but it is in fact a successful Delhi call-centre operator. Its computer screens show GMT. They also give the temperature in the UK, in case a staff member feels the urge to reveal that India is enjoying yet another day of blue skies and sunshine.

'We find showing new staff videos of Yes, Prime Minister is particularly effective,' said Raman Roy, Spectramind's chief executive. 'They get a two-hour seminar on the royal family. We download the British tabloids from the web to see what our customers are reading. We make new staff watch Premier League games on TV.'

Spectramind claims to shun the encouragement of false accents, but other companies persist with such policies. And the effect of splitting personalities and changes in social and family life forced by the new working patterns is starting to be scrutinised in India. Critics raise cultural concerns and suggest there is a high turnover rate of staff. The industry is already encountering some of the same problems that quickly emerged in the West. Call centres are finding it harder to retain workers as the economy strengthens.

This is primarily because many jobs involve long hours staring at computer screens and offer few career prospects. Burn-out rates in India's £1 billion-a-year industry are extremely high, with industry watchers estimating that one in three workers quits after only a year.

The author Arundhati Roy recently remarked that the adoption of foreign accents 'for jobs in call centres show how easily an ancient civilisation can be made to abase itself completely'.

From The Observer: Bombay calling...

This was a very, very bad mistake.

Because now I'm thinking about forced code-switching in the workplace. And I truly doubt anyone wants to read about that.

Personally, I don't especially like that it exists as a concept.