H105, American History I, Fall 2021

The following reading can be found in two files under Files in Canvas: chennai1-2.pdf and chennai3-14.pdf.

1.  Boo, Katherine, “The Best Job in Town: The Americanization of Chennai,” The New Yorker, July 5, 2004

Given the severe and sustained economic downturn (from before the ongoing pandemic) that continues to afflict the United States, it is worth thinking about educational will and economic tenacity in this fiercely competitive era of “globalization,” since it is your generation which has been handed responsibility to implement some kind of reconstruction of this struggling country and declining empire.  Part of that process involves knowing much more about the global economy as a whole, and other national economies in particular.  Imagine yourself a Benjamin Franklin fitting into the commercialization of the economy in the eighteenth century, or a Harriett Robinson fitting into the industrialization of the economy in the nineteenth century.  You are, in your historical moment, fitting into the globalization of the economy continuing from the twentieth into the twenty-first century.

For this paper I will use globalizing India as a case study, since more and more American businesses have been relocating there, and more and more American entrepreneurs are learning there.  How is the United States going to keep from falling behind?  How are you going to keep up with the rest of the world?

The New Yorker article is about an American company, Office Tiger, doing business in Chennai, the fourth-largest city in India.  I myself disagreed with certain aspects of the article, but I still learned a lot from it, and it definitely reminded me of many themes of our H105 course.  I don’t know what you associate with ”outsourcing,“ but Office Tiger is not doing low-skilled work.  It is not a sweatshop; it is not marred by the human rights violations otherwise so routine and so pervasive in the ”global economy“ (yet so shamefully ignored by American media).  Instead, Office Tiger is furtively doing highly skilled white-collar work for major American corporations at one-tenth an American salary.  It represents the confluence of two sets of yearnings:  American corporate yearning for cheap labor and lucrative profit, and Indian middle-class yearning for upward social mobility in a place where per capita income was then $1.20 per day.  (Ponder that number for a little while.)

The questions to answer:

(#1) Why, in college at Princeton, did these two young men eat applesauce in their dorm rooms so they could spend an extra hour working on a medieval history paper, when they were destined to go to Harvard Business School and then Wall Street?  Why did excelling in medieval history matter so much to them?

(#2) To what degree were these two American executives committed to the community of Chennai?  What was the relationship between their ideological faith in the “free market” and “meritocracy,” and real conditions in the city of Chennai?  In other words, who are the winners of the so-called “free market”?  Who are the losers?

More interestingly, you’ll also meet twenty-something Harish Kumar, who after a record of failure stopped school at age 16, but who in 2004 was an instructor at Office Tiger imparting technical and cultural knowledge to employees during their six-month probationary periods.  Mr. Kumar is half-Benjamin Franklin, half-Harriet Robinson, gone global.

(#3) What does Mr. Kumar’s typical workday look like?  How does he spend his spare time?  How does he enjoy his relatively high income?  (Notice, too, what Mr. Kumar jealously imagines takes place in American college dormitories!)

(#4) As you will read, Office Tiger employees in India are working extremely assiduously to gain exposure to the broader world beyond their home city, and to the white-collar end of the global economy.  Meanwhile, how are you working (assiduously?) to gain exposure to the broader world and to the global economy, so that you might be able to compete with the ever increasing number of Harish Kumars in the world?

(#5) What is the other, more hidden, and more disquieting meaning of “exposure” in Mr. Kumar’s world, as discussed in the article?  What potential economic shift was he becoming vulnerable to?  (Indeed, what are you yourself vulnerable to?)

You will be evaluated on your close attention to the contents of the articles in your responses to each of the questions.  Those responses will vary in length.  There are obviously no right or wrong answers.  The key factor is close attention.

Thorough and thoughtful papers with short quotes will receive full extra credit — one notch up in their final grade for the course (e.g., from B to B+).  Less than thorough papers (with vague platitudes and/or long block quotes) will receive NO extra credit.  Please don’t waste either your time or our time.