THE BEST JOB IN TOWN.(the Americanization of Chennai, India due to outsourcing performed by firms like Office Tiger)

One Monday this spring, a forty-three-year-old salesclerk at the Home Depot in Plano, Texas, scribbled some updates onto an old resume and took it to his local copy shop. To his education and work history--a bachelor's degree in industrial engineering and technology, service in the U.S. Marine Corps--he added a recent moonlighting job as a handyman and a new "career objective." Ten minutes later, in southern India, a middle-aged Hindu man in a cavernous workplace began to type the Home Depot clerk's words. A prevailing fiction in the Indian office was that the dozens of "document specialists" doing American work didn't actually register the content of the resumes, funeral programs, pro-se lawsuits, and erotic manifestos sent to them over broadband from store counters with "While-U-Wait" signs. Rather, the document specialists were to type, format, proofread, and zap things back while maintaining an exquisite blankness of mind. But American resumes, as much as American erotica, caused an inconvenient upwelling of emotion. "To secure a position at a company that would utilize my skills and provide an opportunity for advancement": row upon row of typing Indians recognized the Plano clerk's yearning as their own.

The typists were new, entry-level employees at a prominent firm in the sprawling coastal city of Chennai--still "wet behind the ears," as Americans would say, or so they'd been informed during a company crash course on Western ways. Their narrow cubicles were lodged on the sixth floor of a pink stucco building whose lobby possessed, in addition to a purposeless set of turnstiles and a statue of the Hindu god Ganesh, solid evidence that even plastic rhododendrons will wilt in extreme heat. Most of the workers had been born in Chennai and would, in all likelihood, die there. Still, from their workstations they could imagine, not unreasonably, that they were seeing a bit of the world. Their employer, a company named Office Tiger, did the work not just of an American copy-shop chain but of seven of the twelve biggest banks on Wall Street--confidential labor carried out in unmarked rooms with film-covered windows, closed-circuit cameras, and electronic security so unforgiving that as the typist finished the resume from Plano three bankers, accidentally locked in a nearby room, were frantically pounding on a door. Office Tiger also performed work for a Big Four accounting agency, several white-shoe Northeastern law firms, an insurance conglomerate, two large publishing concerns, a Madison Avenue advertising agency, global management consultancies, and other enterprises whose identities were not divulged to workers of the resume-typing rank.

The document specialists, all college graduates, earned roughly a tenth of what they would have commanded for this work in the U.S., and less, too, than they would have been paid in some call centers. But it was the possibility that one could rise up from a lowly position that had made Office Tiger one of the city's status employers, a firm whose workers were so pleased by their affiliation that they put it on their wedding invitations, just below their fathers' names. A foreign notion--that jobs should be distributed on the basis of merit--was amending the rules of a society where employment had for millennia been allotted by caste, and great possibilities abounded. A clerk who today did a bang-up job of formatting the work history of a part-time handyman in Plano might be an adjunct investment banker by year's end.

Chennai, the capital of the state of Tamil Nadu, was at one time an agglomeration of fishing hamlets near the Bay of Bengal--a mile-wide spit of sand upon which seventeenth-century British traders imposed the name Madras. As the imperialists built forts and seaside promenades, the less refined aspects of colonialism sharpened the Tamil-speaking locals' preference for their indigenous culture. This now vast community--the fourth-largest city in India, after Delhi, Mumbai, and Calcutta--was, until recently, a willfully anti-cosmopolitan place. If the Calcuttan post-colonial ideal was outward-looking, intellectual, and romantic, like the heroes of Satyajit Ray films, Chennaians rated hard work over lofty thought, science over poetizing, and humility over everything else. Though most Chennai residents were Hindu, violence against the city's Muslim minority was relatively rare. Discord between rich and poor was similarly muted--perhaps because the city's elites tended to leave ostentation to the peacocks, which (along with goats, water buffalo, auto-rickshaws, roosters, and homeless families) beautified the roadsides.

For centuries, the Western world knew this city, if at all, through a group of unpresumptuous tradesmen: weavers who rendered the colorful, comfortable madras plaid that has long outfitted the gentries of Cornwall and Nantucket. This "better cheape" cloth, as one seventeenth-century British trader described it, provided the city with an economic base until the late twentieth century, when tariffs and global competition brought many power looms to a standstill. Some former weavers earned renown for a more macabre kind of trading: as one of the international black market's primary sources of human kidneys. Other citizens, though, turned to more renewable resources for economic survival. Capitalizing on their celebrated work ethic, on a dozen practical-minded local universities, and on the ability of the elites to speak, in addition to Tamil, the clipped and elegant English of their colonizers, Chennaians developed the sort of forward-looking economy that many of America's post-manufacturing cities still struggle to achieve. "Better cheape" Western business is Chennai's new niche.

Schoolgirls here maintain a picturesque ancient tradition--entwining their braids, morning and night, with fragrant jasmine flower. The perfume is particularly welcome lately, as constant road construction, unprecedented automotive pollution, and a three-year drought have created a stench that the vanilla candles in the new wi-fi coffeehouses cannot mask. Flower fields have given way to steel-and-glass buildings, which, despite continuous exposure to sun in one of the world's least temperate climates, have become a status essential. The glass in these office towers is blue and black and silver, and its impenetrability seems at first to be a consequence of the city's blinding sun. The refraction is partly by design. American uneasiness about outsourcing--an issue in the current Presidential campaign--has turned Chennai into a secretive city, where the American back-office presence, everywhere felt, is almost nowhere stated. Although American companies with Picassos in their foyers and Corbusier chairs in reception still dispatch work to South Asia office buildings fronted by beggars and spavined cattle, the company names have been deleted from phone books, Web sites, and corporate entryways. The American International School in Chennai, which serves children of American executives and diplomats, recently doubled in size. It wears no sign on its gate.

The British were drawn to India as a physical place: a repository of precious raw materials from which the natives might be parted, and a locus of beauty and mystique. The new American attachment is not physical but conceptual--the lure of cheap, smart, pliable labor. Among Chennai's janitors and security guards, as well as its bankers, the need for discretion about that labor is understood. Even the ephemera of the United States offshoring debate becomes front-page news here; many of Chennai's young professionals now know the names John Kerry, Lou Dobbs, Benedict Arnold, and Timothy Platt--the latter the proprietor of a U. S.-based Web site called yourjobisgoingtoindia.com, which is as closely followed in Chennai as it is in Silicon Valley. Fascination with the American controversy is more bemused than fearful. Chennaians in general believe that what they call "outsource hoopla" has already redounded to their favor, alerting a wider audience of executives and stockholders to the benefits of wage arbitrage.