Adventures in India

Ok, I'll be honest. One of my majors in college may have been marketing, but I've never actually used the degree. But I must say, I have been the victim of marketing ever since I moved here. Yes, I said victim, not consumer.

It is amazing how many sales calls I get on my cell-phone on a daily basis. Here in India, spamming is a valid business practice. Now, I'm not saying I didn't get my fair share of calls in the United States, but after adding our numbers to the federal DNC (Do Not Call) sheet, the numbers went significantly down.

(For those of you unfamiliar, in the United States, companies are not allowed to call people on this list unless they have (or had) a prior business relationship with the consumer, and the consumer has the option to "opt out" at any time)

In Bangalore, the first thing I did when I started receiving calls was to add a "blacklist" app to my cell phone, and block the numbers I didn't want to hear from. Unfortunately, this didn't work for two reasons. Number one: the people calling have hundreds of numbers to use, and I can only block them one at a time. Number two:  many of the numbers were not actually numbers at all - I receive texts (called SMS in India) from phone "numbers" starting with letters, which my app cannot block.

Jason and I have different cell providers - I have Tata Docomo, and he uses Airtel (I got the hand-me-down SIM from his first weeks here). Airtel offered Jason an option to be added to a DNC list, and he opted in, but as of yet he hasn't seen this make a difference. I haven't been offered the same option, but my guess is - it wouldn't help. The large majority of sales calls or texts I receive are actually direct from my provider.
In my opinion, this fact makes the below less reassuring that it would be otherwise.