IT in middle class neighbhourhoods in Bangalore

After a 3 year stay away from Bangalore, first for an MBA and then work, I returned to the city I call home a few months back. The transformation in my middle class neighbourhood was quite striking. There were signs of prosperity everywhere, many houses had been redone and there were more cars parked in every street, all this thanks to the resident acronym that defines Bangalore - "IT". Every family seemed to have been touched by the IT sweep. All my childhood friends had become software engineers in different companies. Those few who chose not to become engineers were still a part of the IT troupe as lawyers, marketers, accountants and HR personnel. Now, even my next door aunty knew how to tell the difference between an Infosys, TCS, Oracle and IBM.

Daily interactions in the neighbourhood threw interesting gems about the prevalent mindset about IT. One elderly uncle asked me, "So, you are in this company, you must be travelling quite frequently to the US." I made a feeble attempt to educate him about IT consumption in India and mumbled about my frequent travels within the country, the uncle was not impressed. A schoolmate of mine asked me, "So, what is your job profile?", for once I thought I'd got a discerning listener and rattled out my JD around sales and presales. The friend gave me a dissapointed look and said, "But you were pretty good at studies in school, why did you take up sales?". Later I learned that in Bangalore, sales is associated with either door-to-door selling or call-centers. No wonder, my schoolmate scowled that way.

Things are not this way in Mumbai and Delhi. You get to meet a lot of young people who are pursuing degrees in pure sciences and liberal arts. People there seek a larger pool of career options beyond engineering and medicine. There are many who want to be lawyers, bureaucrats, journalists and admen. I find Bangalore suffocating in this respect. Very often I come across friends who've been sucked into the engineering-IT rigmarole and are gasping to come out. Yesterday I met one such. He'd been through the IT coding phase for 4-5 years. Last year he compeleted a correspondence diploma course from an IIM and switched to market research. He sounded relieved. I met another extreme example of this phenomenon last weekend. Here was a guy who did his civil engineering and then worked for an IT firm for a couple of months and then quit on the verge of breakdown. He joined a sports portal as a content editor and is now at least happy with his job, but is trying to move because the pay is extremely low. Without a relavant educational background he is finding it tough to break into the big league in media. He's languishing in an itsy-bitsy firm that's squeezing him dry for a pittance. He's now thinking of doing an MBA from a tier-3 B-school, in a hope that it will give him the legitimate pedigree that he's looking for. Sigh...what a mess.

Today, fortunately, as a fall out of India's economic growth there are a whole lot of viable professions that have opened up beyond engineering and medicine. CROs and pharma need biologists and their tribe. Law firms, LPOs, IT companies need lawyers. Media has an unsatiable thirst for journalists and language graduates. Everybody needs salesmen and marketers of every conceivable background. I hope things change as we go forward and kids are encouraged to take up what their comfortable with and not simply what is in vogue. My brother is studying to be a lawyer, I wish I had done so.