Indian by day, American by night.

• Author: Pal, Amitabh
• Position: Brief Article

Students at a call center training institute in New Delhi are learning how to speak English, American-style.

"It's peetzah, not piza, beeautiful, not bootiful," the instructor admonishes them. "And you have to learn to be more polite," says Surinder Singh Gill of Hero Mindmine. "You can't say, 'You have ordered it. Here's the bill.' That's very rude. Say something like, 'Thank you for ordering at Domino's.' That's much more proper."

In an adjoining room, other students are studying an interactive computer program that shows them how an "average" American family lives. The all-white faces that pop up on the screen reside in a huge house. A member of the family, Chris, practices ballet. The students are instructed to hear the narration--in an American accent--and answer questions about the family. In spite of my protestations, instructor Anuja Mehta asks a student to get out of his chair so I can sit down. Mehta gives me a pair of headphones to try the program out.

"Many of these people had no clue what a ballet or a tutu was," sighs Mehta. "You have no idea how much we're broadening their horizons."

In another part of India, the British Empire is striking back with a vengeance. "Sixteh, seventeh, eighteh, nineteh," intones Anupama Asthana in her best British accent to a group of students in Bangalore. "Bloody rude," she adds. On a board in the classroom, there's a cartoon of Prince Charles. Numbers below the cartoon inform the students about the London weather and the fate of the stock market there. Headlines give the latest on the European Union expansion.

Welcome to the Anglo-Americanization of India, or at least of urban English-speaking youth. The call center industry is extracting a sliver of Indians who are actively de-Indianizing themselves and adopting Western names and identities, accents and culture.

I recently toured a number of call centers to see how they function and the impact they're having on Indian society. I even went to one call center that The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman had visited and glowed about. He said what "an uplifting experience" it was and how the workers "seem to have gained self-confidence and self-worth." Friedman has also trumpeted the "social revolution" that has come to India because of the formation of a new class of young urban "zippies" due to outsourcing.

What I found, however, was not so delightful.

Call center training institutes are springing up all over die bigger cities in India, helping young people, for a fee, to de-Indianize themselves. Hero Mindmine, which proclaims itself the largest national chain, says that it has trained 25,000 students nationwide since it opened three years ago, with a claimed 90 percent placement rate. The process of transformation at such institutes involves listening to CDs and other audiovisual material for an American accent, plus voice samples, activities, and role play, says Snehal Kulshreshtha of Hero Mindmine. Some companies prefer that employees put on an accent and others prefer "accent neutralization," he says. The American cultural offerings that Hero Mindmine uses are Full House, Frasier, and Friends, while CNN and Fox News are used to teach them the American "lifestyle," he adds.

Often, these training institutes are hole-in-the-wall operations. I visited one such classroom in Bangalore. A few students sat around in a small room on the fifth floor listening to a young, smartly dressed instructor, Sanjay, teach them the "correct" intonation.

"We try to neutralize their accent so that there is no m.t.i.--mother tongue influence," says Sunil...