This television series will have you at hello. Mumbai Calling, which premiered on HBO on November 8, is a hilarious send-up of the business process outsourcing industry. Dealing with the misadventures of the Mumbai-based call-centre workers of Teknobable Communications as they handle the complaints of faraway British clients, the comedy succeeds because it’s spoofy without being snarky. Mumbai Calling does much more than attempt to extract humour from fake accents and adopted names. “We didn’t want to make fun of Indians in call centres,” said Stojan Petrov, the director of one of the three episodes that airs this fortnight. “We also wanted to establish the characters of the three characters and, in subsequent episodes, the call centre agents.”
The show’s star attraction is Sanjeev Bhaskar, the incredibly talented British actor who has appeared in Goodness GraciousMe and Kumarsat 42 and who’s currently performing at the West End as King Arthur in the musical Monty Python’s Spamalot. “The western view of Indian call centre workers precludes the idea that these workers are smart, intelligent graduates who have been sometimes thrust into impossible situations,” Bhaskar said in an email interview. “I wanted to capture the more positive view of the operatives and suggest that it’s the situation that’s absurd, not really the people either side.”
There are shades of The Office in the interaction between the three principal characters. Bhaskar is Kenny Gupta, the harried head of the call centre who’s been forced to relocate from his beloved England to a city he doesn’t care for. His assistant is the manic and lascivious Dev Raja (Nitin Ganatra), while his bête noire – and love interest – is Terri Johnson (Daisy Beaumont), who is sent by headquarters to Mumbai to keep an eye on Teknobable’s balance sheet. The jokes are targetted at the three leads as well as at the often dim callers who need help with such trifles as increasing the volume on their computers or assessing the number of calories in chocolate truffle bars. Also thrown in are gentle digs at Mumbai’s realities – traffic jams, flush tanks that never dispense enough water, tiny flats and large families.
The show’s sensitivity to Indian sentiments could also have something to do with the fact that the series is being shown in India ahead of its United Kingdom premiere on ITV1 early next year. Apart from a pilot episode, the series hasn’t been telecast in the UK.
The forces of globalisation that created the BPO boom are also evident in the manner in which the seven-part show has come together. Commissioned by British television giant ITV, the show is the brainchild of Los Angeles-based Allan McKeown. Its writers include McKeown, Bhaskar and British writer Simon Blackwell.
All the call centre agents are played by local actors, including Namit Das, Vir Das, Kunal Roy Kapur, Naren Chandavarkar and Ratnabali Bhattacharjee. The series was shot entirely in Mumbai, at Concorde Studio in Goregaon, as well as at real locations in the city. “That’s also the charm of the series,” Petrov said. “This isn’t a made-in-England show.” An American version is being planned as well.
In the episode that airs on November 15, a global positioning service for taxi drivers in the UK goes off the road, while Terri stays with Dev’s humunguous family for one night when she fails to find a hotel room. In the November 22 episode – which includes a few shots of a famous actor on a specially designed cover of Time Out Mumbai – a struggling theatre actor (Richard E Grant) arrives at Teknobable to teach the agents about different English accents and creates mayhem. Meanwhile, a mafia don (Dalip Tahil) threatens the Teknobable trinity with dire consequences if they fail to pay protection money. “I do think that the call centres I have seen are both hyper-real places and inevitable byproducts of globalisation,” Bhaskar said. “After a while reality becomes self defining, whether that means a call centre or a dairy farm or a popular listings magazine publisher! It only begins to look hyper-real from the outside. Just like us as individuals. Comedy can hold up a mirror to society and gently and hopefully entertainingly suggest an alternate view.” Nandini Ramnath
Source : Time Out Mumbai ISSUE 1 Friday, September 02, 2011
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