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India The High Tech Mirage
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India The High Tech Mirage

2014 · 28 MIN · EN · STATUS: [ STREAMING ]
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Bangalore built its reputation as India's answer to Silicon Valley on cheap, round-the-clock labor for the world's tech and telecom firms, and this film looks at what that labor costs the people doing it. Nilut, a 20-year-old call center worker, describes the appeal of the job first: independence, her own money, an escape from her family's expectations. She also works 12-hour night shifts for about $260 a month, a schedule that recurs across the interviews here. An IT professional talks through his own depression on camera, describing a workplace culture where being unavailable at any hour is treated as failure. The film sets these accounts against a statistic it returns to more than once: Bangalore's suicide rate has risen 40 percent over the past decade, a trend interviewees tie directly to overwork, isolation from family, and a professional culture with little tolerance for stress or failure. Rather than a broad survey of India's tech economy, the film stays close to individual workers, using their routines and their own words to show what the city's growth has demanded of them.