The effect of globalisation - from an Indian perspective

An article on globsalisation written in an extremely personal and interesting manner... taken from the Business Times on 28 Dec 2007

A letter writer in Mumbai telephones his daughter

(MUMBAI) G P Sawant never charged the prostitutes for his letter writing services.

Not long after the women would descend on this swarming, chaotic city, they would find him at his stall near the post office, this letter writer for the unlettered. They often came hungry, battered and lonely, needing someone to convert their spoken words into handwritten letters to post back to their home villages.

The letters ferried false reassurances. The women claimed that they had steady jobs as shopkeepers and Bollywood stagehands. Saying nothing of the brothels, beatings and rapes they endured, they enclosed money orders to remit rupees agonisingly acquired. Many called Mr Sawant 'brother' and tied a string on his wrist each year in the Hindu tradition.

Sometimes, suspicious parents boarded a train to Mumbai and appeared at Mr Sawant's stall, which a daughter had listed as her address. Mr Sawant greeted them kindly but disclosed nothing about the daughter's work or whereabouts.

Such is the letter writer's honour code: when you live by writing other people's letters, you die with their secrets.
But now the professional letter writer is confronting the fate of middlemen everywhere: to be cut out. In India, the world's fastest-growing market for mobile phones, calling the village or sending a text message has all but supplanted the practice of dictating your intimacies to someone else.

And so Mr Sawant, 61, and by his own guess the author of more than 10,000 of other people's letters, was sitting idly at his stall on a recent Monday, having earned just 12 cents from an afternoon spent filling out forms, submitting money orders, wrapping parcels - the postal trivialities that have survived the evaporation of his trade.

But this is not the familiar story of the artisan flattened by the new economy, because, it turns out, his family has gained more from that economy than it has lost.

Mr Sawant has three children riding the Indian economic boom, including a daughter, Suchitra, who works at Infosys, one of the pre-eminent Indian outsourcing firms. Suchitra now earns US$9,000 a year, three times as much as her father did at his peak.

Globalisation is said to create winners and losers. For the Sawants, it created both. And that duality reflects the furious pace at which entire professions are being invented and entire professions destroyed in the rush to modernise India.

There is, on one hand, a national quest under way to excise inefficiencies - to cut out middlemen. But for every occupation that vanishes, another is born. There are now mall attendants in a nation that until lately had no malls, McDonald's cashiers in a country where cows are sacred and Porsche sales executives in a land where most people still walk. It used to be hard to obtain your own computer or telephone line in India; the country now has more software engineers and call-centre operators than just about anywhere else.

Mr Sawant entered the letter writing trade in 1982 when he won a government tender for a coveted stall inside the post office headquarters. Before long, he earned a reputation among illiterate migrants as a gifted writer of letters.

There were some letters Mr Sawant would not write. He refused, for example, to trade in romantic love. Love is fickle and dangerous, he said. Lovers lie; they cheat; they offer their love and rescind it. He refused to engage in chicanery on other people's behalf.

As Mr Sawant remembers it, 1995 happened to be the year when everything began to change.
India was emerging at that time from a long spell of economic autarky and stagnation, in which one had to reserve long-distance telephone calls days in advance, as if they were tables at a posh restaurant. With the land-line infrastructure so dreary, the mobile phone was greeted with special enthusiasm when it arrived in India in the 1990s. Phone companies, seeking to tap a vast market of 1.1 billion Indians, innovated to drop their prices to as low as one cent a minute. It did not take long for the personal letter to become obsolete.

Mr Sawant is not bitter. He said that he was happy to stay behind if his country advanced. He is happy, of course, because his four children, all of whom went to private school from the proceeds of letter writing, have pulled the Sawants into the upper middle class. His son works at a bank; one daughter works as a civil engineer in Denmark; another daughter is studying computers in college; and there is Suchitra, who is currently in New Jersey on assignment for Infosys.

Mr Sawant's mention of New Jersey prompted a suggestion. A cameraman making a videotape for this story was about to return to New York, not far from where Suchitra is working. Did Mr Sawant want to scribble a letter to his daughter for her to hand-deliver? His answer was instantaneous.

'Why would I send her a letter?' he asked, perplexed. 'I'll just call her on the phone.' - NYT