Mr Wilberforce, where are you when people need you?

If there are two things in life I can't abide, leaving aside for a moment that dreadful TV reportrix from Belfast with a whiny voice that's tailor-made for funerals and Bad News, it's buzzing bluebottles and phone calls from India . Bluebottles I can happily pursue for hours on end, and some have even likened my action with the fly-swat to that of Andy Murray with the tennis racquet, except that I always win, as the gooey splodges of ex-bluebottles that adorn the conservatory windows mournfully testify (and come and report on that, Rita, right nah-eeee), but said fly-swat isn't quite long enough to reach Mumbai and swat the wretched woman who phoned just now to ask me questions about my telephone service supplier and thereby caused the potatoes to boil over and make a filthy mess of the cooker.

But the thing is, when it's tea-time in Knotty End it's midnight in Mumbai - and if that isn't the first line of a song that Noel Coward never wrote I don't know what is - and this long-suffering lass in a call-centre in the dead of night has probably just started her shift, during most of which she will suffer verbal abuse, racist abuse, and at best, polite peremptoriness, as she did from me: "Please go away."

But I wonder whether Mumbai's call-centre staff dream of meeting at dawn on the banks of the Ulhas to sing "Shall we gather at the river?", because the world has been here before - the rich exploiting the poor, to save a bob or two back home (where more and more people are without jobs.)

Mohandas Gandhi and William Wilberforce - please come back.

Adiga, Aravind The white tiger . - London : Atlantic, 2008