New Delhi: Uma Phago has no memory of seeing a human stomach, not even her own. But she remembers very well what a stomach feels like. After her sister gave birth by Caesarean section, Phago ran her curious fingers along the stitched-up abdominal ridge. The sensation never left her mind.
Different tune: Visually challenged employees engaged in medical transcription work at Vindhya E Infomedia Pvt. Ltd in Bangalore. (Photo: Kiran/Mint)
In the Indian outsourcing company where she works, her job is to transcribe what American doctors record on their dictaphones. They send their files at sundown to India, and a team of 5,500 Indians works while the doctors sleep. Every so often, the dictation involves a Cesarean, and Phago’s ears perk up with fascination.
Phago, one of eight blind workers at CBay Systems Ltd, takes longer than most of her colleagues to type up the details. But because she is blind, she seems to get more of a thrill doing it, imagining the lives of the faraway patients and squeezing from each assignment a quantum of pleasure that is ever rarer in the tedious, soul-deadening world of Indian back-offices.
In the dark, drab office where Phago works, her sighted colleagues stare all day long at their screens, conversing only rarely with one another and never with the doctors they assist. Working behind a virtual wall for foreigners you never meet is not for everyone. The grinding, repetitive, anonymous nature of much outsourcing work is one reason why even the best Indian back offices struggle to retain good employees longer than one year.
But Phago, who has been here for more than a year, has no plan to leave. She was hired as part of CBay’s corporate social-responsibility experiment, and although the programme reflects only a tiny corner of a vast industry, it has turned up an unexpected truth: Blindness seems to infuse the outsourcing transaction with a warmth and a mystique that the sighted often fail to see, almost as though outsourcing were made for the blind. “It’s our advantage, this imagination thing,” Phago said. “Our whole life, we are imagining.”
Phago, who lost her sight when she was 3, learnt long ago to make technicolour mental sketches from the most humdrum touches and sounds, and so when a Caesarean tape arrives, she thinks immediately of her sister’s ridged belly. As she transcribes, she wonders if the scar, on some unknown American woman, would feel like that one felt.
She speculates about how the cut was made, if it hurt, what instruments were used. Her imagination prances from one picture to the next. So vivid are these conjured portraits that, when the occasional dictation reports a patient’s death, Phago often buckles over her keyboard and cries.
She is 24, pencil-thin and as short as a girl half her age. She is the kind of person who grows amused at her own thoughts in the middle of uttering them and constantly interrupts herself with smiles and giggles.