Mirpur city of Kashmir is often called the ‘eastern most city of United Kingdom’ due to big population of British Kashmiris (Pakistanis or just Muslims, whatever they want to be known as).Jars of Marmite(a British peculiarity which I have never tasted) and tins of tuna fish and ‘baked beans in tomato sauce’ are easily available in local shops. The supermarkets from Mirpur, would not be out of place in streets of Bradford or Birmingham
Opening the Sunday edition of Pakistani English language newspaper, I saw this quarter page advertisement, British Call Centre Requires Manager and UK accent CSR (Customer Service Representives).
After watching the film ‘Swades’, about an Indian born NASA scientist who after designing a satellite goes back to his birthplace in poor North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and builds a water reservoir to generate electricity for poor villagers on self-help basis. I was also filled with a sense of patriotic altruism (slightly misplaced I must admit) and wanted to go back and ‘do something’ (yet not sure what, where and how).
Mostly British Pakistanis visit ‘Back Home’ in the summer school vacations from June to September , not a perfect time I must add as the temperature average is above 40 Celsius during this time, hardly comfortable for mild weathered British-Pakistanis.
I felt that the advertisement was a ‘God sent’ sign for my next venture(adventure more likely).The Call Centre was an ‘Out-bound’ facility, meaning that CSRs were making calls to British phone lines through Internet Voice Data Protocol and selling every thing from mobile phones to credit card deals to British customers. The savvy customers are able to detect the ‘Indian Accent’ coming from bigger and better IT firms in Bangalore India and come up with rebuttals like “why are you calling me from India?” to which the clueless CSR has no defence. More importantly Indian CSRs often don’t have the local British knowledge e.g. the geographical difference between Dundee and Dudley.
On the agreed day I arrived at the office for the interview, the CEO was the younger brother of a British businessman, he had visited his elder brother in Bradford a few times but never actually lived in UK for any long duration, while the ‘Big Brother’ controlled the nerve centre of his BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) remotely from his office in UK.
The management team which were supposed to interview me, were a ‘Robbie William’ (no not the Robbie Williams Singer but his Pakistani Christian name sake) who had acquired a shaky ‘American Accent’ due to his high school diploma from Texas where his father was once posted and the assistant manageress, a Hijab wearing student from one of the many Am-Anglo (not the Anglo American) Schools of capital Islamabad. The supervisor (and accent coach) was a Canadian born Pakistani whose favourite topics were alcohol and Canadian dollar exchange rate.
