Reuters
 
Bangalore, Nov 13: The Archbishop of Bangalore does not think the city's legions of call centre workers are going straight to hell.

But he is worried that the young men and women working the phones at night may be engaging in “unsaintly bouts of sex and drug taking”.

While Westerners may vilify India's call centre workers for stealing their jobs, conservatives at home worry the young employees – who mostly work overnight and earn far more than earlier generations – are helping themselves to an alien set of Western values.

"Many have told me they have spiritual problems," said the Archbishop, the most senior Catholic in a city of more than half-a-million Christians. "Girls will come to me saying, 'I have been friends with a boy. I have misbehaved. I feel perturbed in heart and mind'," he delicately added.

The Indian media has helped fuel the call centres' "Sodom and Gomorrah" reputation with stories of used condoms blocking call centre toilet drains and drug taking during night shifts.

It suggests this behaviour is an inevitable consequence of young people working the night shift to deal with customers in the West, even if it's to discuss staid topics such as the customer's mortgage repayment or why the printer won't print.

Call centres have been a powerful catalyst for a blossoming youth culture in India by giving large numbers of young Indians the financial means to live away from the disapproving glares of their elders and to enjoy cafes, malls and bars that did not exist a generation ago.

Their pay packets of up to Rs 20,000 a month are 10 times higher than the national average monthly salary.

Headbanging

An almost impenetrable barricades of parked motorbikes blocks the entrance to Purple Haze, one of the many Bangalore bars brimming at the weekend with outsourcing and IT industry workers.

Inside young men in grungy clothes head-bang to hard rock. Vicky, whooping along to music videos blaring overhead, is one of an estimated 4,15,000 people working in call centres outsourced to India from the West to deal with mundane issues such as utility payments and credit card bills.

"Everything is exaggerated by the media," he said, sipping whisky. "In India, people still have respect for Indian values."

At 26, he is by no means the only guy in the bar who believes it is wrong to have sex before marriage - certainly he says he held off until his wedding a couple of months back.