Excerpts:Q: How did this book come about? A: I was an H1B worker in the US from 2011 to 2013. And during my time there as an electrical engineer, I got more than a whiff that there was some scam going on in the H1B visa programme… And this idea really stayed with me, this idea of primarily Indians exploiting Indians in the US. Cut to a few years later, I returned to India to pursue my passion of being a full-time writer and a journalist. And this idea then really thundered back to me in all its different manifestations… I think subconsciously I wanted to write a book that would explore morality, enslavement, identity of modern day Indian elites… The actual story though snowballed into a much bigger and much more significant something… This started off as a very literary project… I wanted to write a “non-fiction novel”… Then these questions started to ping my conscience: why do we not know about this scam? Who benefits from it, apart from the obvious corporate American entities? And then I figured out that this is not just about a few individuals or a few firms. It’s essentially like an entire society colluding to both perpetrate and also hide the scam... You have these immigration forums, anonymous people with fake monikers talking about how they scam the system. You have visa mills and a bunch of parties coming together to perpetrate something really, really horrific. So the book changed during the process. I changed during the process. Q: It was as if your mind was exploding and you had to put it out there to say, what on earth are we living side by side with? A: Sometimes it felt like a science fiction story… I was constantly taken aback, not just by the brazenness of the scam, but also about how this was hiding in plain sight… On the one hand, you are seeing all these crazy things that are happening, and on the other, there’s absolute silence about it in the outer world… There were many heartbreaking things that I found… I was very surprised by the kinds of entities that I used to consider heroes. Say the American media, academia, some politicians — most of them turned out to be villains… Just understanding how it is humanly possible for human beings, in this case three protagonists, to absorb so much of pain, to absorb so much of anguish… on a day to day basis and yet have the courage to solder on. These are the things that really stayed with me. Q: What exactly is the business model of a desi consultancy? A: Think of it as a chain of blocks. So essentially you have a client, which is to say like a Fortune 500 firm or a corporate America entity which wants — I mean back in 2010 or something — let’s say wanted a Java specialist. So it would ask a big outsourcing giant, which is called a prime vendor, do you have a Java specialist for this kind of a contractual position? If they do, they supply that. If they don’t, that’s when the desi consultancy model comes in, it would ask a smaller outsourcing or a staffing company. And that’s how the chain gets built. You have a client, you have a prime vendor, then you have one or two companies in between. Then you have an H1B employer who is sponsoring the visa for an H1B worker. Now, a decade ago, if a client was paying around $120 per hour for a Java specialist or for an IT specialist with six years of experience, different parties would take a cut and the H1B worker would get somewhere around $25 an hour. And amidst that, there is insane amounts of wage theft. You have your purchase orders being edited, you have no idea how much your employer is getting… There is this thing called benching, wherein you’re supposed to pay the H1B worker when he or she doesn’t have a project. But that never happens. In fact, you don’t just not get paid when you’re benched. You have to pay your employers taxes during that period. There is this immense amount of psychological cruelty that’s meted by Indian owners of body shops or desi consultancies to Indian H1B workers. This dehumanization exists at varying levels. There’s this literal and metaphorical transformation of identity. You are often handed a resume which has seven or eight years of fake experience. Then you get a job through a proxy interview. Even at the client side, if you don’t know anything, you have this process of like on job support where you can outsource your job to some other techie in India. So very rampant exploitation almost becomes the language of this industry. Q: How did you persuade the protagonists to talk to you? First of all, they were themselves so frustrated… Nobody thought their stories were stories. Nobody thought of them as people. So the very fact that I told them that I’m interested in this, that I completely understand your pain, anguish, maybe it had kind of helped that I had done some bit of my own research… I think it was just my persistence. And I think in that persistence, they had seen some bit of my wonder, my innocence, my intellectual curiosity, but also my rage, my very incipient rage... They all got eased into the process because I think they had understood that he’s not a regular journalist, which is to say that he genuinely cares for us as people… I think being genuinely open, innocent and curious about their lives as people and applying largely the same matrices, but icing it with a copious amount of rage about the systemic abuse itself, I think kind of endeared them to talk to me. Q: This H1B scam is kind of a parallel economy which seems to have no closure to it. A: What occurred to me around 2020 is that this is a book about the tyranny of capitalism. It’s about the tyranny or the dictates of American neoliberalism. And I am essentially just using H1B as a metaphor or as a lens to explore that… One can very easily and glibly dismiss a lot of American workers as racist or bigoted or xenophobic. Some of them could be, sure. But many of them are actually not just these things. They are simply very saddened about their economic and psychological and personal devastation. But that’s also one of the biggest corporate cruelties, right? Or it’s one of the biggest corporate tricks… A lot of Americans are just blaming Indians, which is insane to me because given the way this H1B system has been abused… they should not be each other’s adversaries. They should understand that they are both being pitted against each other… This is something that I want a lot of people to understand, that this is essentially not about immigrants versus citizens, it’s about immigrants and citizens versus exploitative corporations and the exploitative American capitalist structure itself.
