Christian subversion and missionary activities

[acharya]

Church steps in to save call centre ‘sinners’
- Frown on western mores
Wired to life in the fast lane

Why does it take so long to get through to a call centre? Because everyone is too busy chatting up their colleagues — and more — if the Catholic Church is to be believed.

The church is so concerned by evidence that call centres are becoming dens of iniquity that it is offering week-long retreats and counselling in the hope of turning staff away from a life of sin.

With employees who are young, usually single, and on starting salaries much higher than those of doctors or lawyers, India’s booming call centre industry has been responsible for a social revolution.

“Women come to work with condoms in their handbags,” said Alkesh Dua, a call centre worker in Noida. “Everyone is doing it. You’re together all night in this cool, hip atmosphere and you end up getting intimate.”

Employers have tried to compensate for the monotonous nature of the work itself by creating an informal, American-style college campus atmosphere, where there is plenty of after-shift drinking and partying. Since many staff work night shifts, after which normal socialising is impossible, office friendships — with accompanying sexual liaisons — have blossomed.

In Bangalore, a call centre hub, the rising number of abortions — up 50 per cent in two years — is blamed on the licentious lifestyles of the call centre workers. Many middle class parents are now reluctant to let their daughters take up such jobs.

The church hopes to reverse the trend with the launch, in Bangalore, of a series of retreats and counselling sessions, before attempting to tackle the new promiscuity among the country’s 1.3 million call centre and outsourcing workers in the country.

“We don’t want to do moral policing, but we want to advise young people that being “modern” doesn’t mean losing their family traditions or moral values,” said Bangalore’s archbishop Bernard Moras.

In New Delhi, Dominic Emmanuel, the spokesman for the Delhi Catholic Archdiocese, said the youth wing in every archdiocese would be mobilised to help. “We have to show them we care by giving them guidance and showing them the dangers of adultery and casual sex.”

The call centre industry, which has been growing by 60 per cent a year, is also under scrutiny over claims that criminal networks are trading British consumers’ bank account details for huge profits.

Long into the night, the clubs and bars in Gurgaon, a Delhi suburb full of call centres, pulsate with staff unwinding after long, stressful shifts dealing with fractious British and American customers.

During the day, workers fill the shopping malls for a dose of instant gratification unknown to their traditionally abstemious parents, for whom saving was a religion.

Call centre staff have been caught by hidden cameras having sex in cubicles.

In a society where dating is frowned upon and where, in some quarters, a woman wearing a sleeveless top is considered sexually immoral, such conduct is bewildering.

Ashok Rau, the chief executive of the Freedom Foundation, an AIDS counselling centre in Bangalore, said financial independence had freed call centre workers from their parents’ control.

In a survey of call centre staff last year, it found that 38 per cent of men and women believed that pre-marital sex was permissible and 25 per cent indulged in casual sex.

The companies involved object vehemently to suggestions that their call centres are dens of vice and adultery.

“It is unfair to single out call centres. This new behaviour can be found all over India and is the result of the economic boom and the opportunities it offers,” said Vrinda Wavalkar, a spokesman for the outsourcing company, ICICI OneSource, in Mumbai.
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH