The Hope Factory A Novel - By Lavanya Sankaran Page 0,22

nose, he resembled a dissolute bird of prey.

Anand thrust the newspaper away when the interviewee entered the room. The young applicant was slender, bespectacled, and dressed in striped shirt and tie. His hair was parted on the side and neatly combed over, possibly with Brylcreem, for he introduced no odor of coconut oil into the room. According to the notes scribbled by Ananthamurthy, he belonged to a Gujarati bania caste and, therefore, was probably vegetarian, home-loving, and good with numbers. He perched nervously in front of Anand’s desk.

“Your good name?” The applicant, Anand noted, was about twenty-six years old, with the requisite four years of experience, and fluent in Kannada, as well as Hindi and Gujarati and English. “Born where? Oh, came to Bangalore as a child, is it? Father is doing what?”

For Ananthamurthy, caste and community were important hiring considerations, but Anand tried to guard against this. He himself had married out of caste—and that, in his mind, was a sign of progress, of stepping away from the rigid brahminical mind-set of his parents. Of course, there was still a tendency to hire the familiar, that was a natural impulse; if he analyzed his employee lists, he saw that most were Kannadiga or at least South Indian, some were brahmin—but, as leavening, there were three Muslims, two Kerala Christians, and several North Indians. In fact, if one considered the new machinery consultants, there were even two foreign—Korean—faces wandering around. As a welcoming gesture, special food was brought for them from the Korean restaurant in the city, and when Mr. Ananthamurthy, in a further gesture of first-day hospitality, decided to eat with them, he found the visitors unwrapping sea leaves, fish, and chicken, the unpalatable smells spreading across the table and staying the consumption of his own strictly vegetarian tiffin.

Mr. Ananthamurthy was conservative in his habits, consuming a large home-cooked meal in the morning and carrying to work a small steel tiffin box packed by his wife and daughters to shield him from the perils of oversalted canteen food. But, in truth, the factory canteen food was tasty; the same dishes were served to workers and managers alike (which Anand personally insisted upon): a good everyday menu of vegetables, dal, rice-sambar-saaru, chapattis, a mixed rice such as chitranna bhath or lemon rice, curds, and a sweet. Fully vegetarian, of course, for that was the preferred way. Indian manufactories might work to upgrade their production methods to international standards, but they were still populated by old-fashioned people with old-fashioned values; one could not argue with that. As Ananthamurthy had discovered, in the call centers and software development offices in the city, things were different. There they introduced American-style ways: fast food, casual attitudes, fun games, crazy decorations. This was apparently done to create environments that no employee would dream of leaving, but of course, that did not work either. Employee turnover continued unabated, like water swirling down an unplugged sink.

It took, on average, three months for new hires to lose their bewilderment, six months to find their feet, and one year to become fully reliable. And then, just as one could put them to work in a thorough fashion and turn one’s attention to other things, they came in blithely ready to quit—citing other job offers, or stress, or nonsense like that one giddy idiot who quit the accounts department to write a book. Employers, it seemed, had to make themselves attractive to potential employees in new and unprecedented ways, as though they were products stacked on supermarket shelves and seeking out buyers.

“You are married? Children?” The good employees usually were. Marriage and children forced a seriousness upon them, prevented them from scurrying from job to job, tempted by any passing incremental offer like a woman of easy virtue and no discrimination.

“Yes, sir. And with two children, sir,” said the applicant, adding considerably to his own worth. “But I am fully willing to travel, if necessary, sir.”

Unfortunately, the thoroughness with which the young man had prepared for the interview had also made him acutely aware of his own market worth. He was asking for 20 percent more than Anand had planned to pay.

In the abstract, Anand fully approved of such a thing. This was what happened when a society slowly moved out of poverty. Better pay, better lifestyles. It still had the power to astonish him, that he should bear witness to this transformation, striking him afresh every time he wandered into a hypermarket, the rows of products from around the