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.

Willful Suspension of Disbelief! - the secret to enjoying movies or for that matter anything at all

Willful Suspension of Disbelief is such a useful concept. This is how wiki defines it,

"Suspension of disbelief is an aesthetic theory intended to characterize people's relationships to art. It was coined by the poet and aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817. It refers to the willingness of a person to accept as true the premises of a work of fiction, even if they are fantastic or impossible. It also refers to the willingness of the audience to overlook the limitations of a medium, so that these do not interfere with the acceptance of those premises. According to the theory, suspension of disbelief is a quid pro quo: the audience tacitly agrees to provisionally suspend their judgment in exchange for the promise of entertainment."

Now as far as movies go, the second part of the last sentence is the key - "in exchange for the promise of entertainment". I am willing to suspend disbelief to any extent required provided the movie maker promises to entertain. Many Bollywood movies fail on this count. On the other hand with a little help from the movie maker and a teaspoon of disbelief, a mundane movie can be elevated to the level of a thorough entertainer. Jhoom barabar Jhoom falls in to this category, I simply loved the movie. Watching Lara Dutta gyrate on the big screen in a fanciful setting was well worth the ticket money. The true essence of disbelief comes in to play while watching animation movies. "Ratatouille" is a case in point. It is my all time favorite. The director makes good on his part by dishing out entertainment garnered with a heart warming message, on your part, if you were to slide back in your seat and choose to overlook the minor impracticalities of a rat becoming a chef, you'll be treated to an inspiring fable of Paulo Coelho proportions. The same holds true in the case of Ashutosh Gowatrikar's "Jhodaa Akbar"....was Akbar tall or short, was Jhodaa his wife or daughter-in-law, who cares. As the lights dim, stretch your feet and let the Mughal era unfold. Smiles as the narrative dwells on the practical difficulties of a Hindu-Muslim marriage even in those days. Cheer when Azeem-0-Shah-Shehanshah plays out like the Olympic opening ceremony, make your side of the disbelief pact and the movie director will deliver on the rest.

Now, this technique works well with other aspects of life too. Try it out the next time you sit in an autorikshaw in Chennai and you don't know Tamil. Try it when you have to eat at a roadside dhaba in alarmingly unhygienic conditions. Try it when you are sitting next to a pesky relative, who loves to deliver long-winding lectures....application of this concept will turn such routine episodes in to thoroughly entertaining experiences. Try it and tell me if willful suspension of disbelief works for you..

Disillusionment and growing up..

You know, when you are a kid, say a five year old, you begin to think that you are all powerful within your realm of activity. You start fancying that you are a super-hero from a cartoon show or a cowboy from a western or like in my case, a mythological Indian prince from Doordarshan or Amar Chitra Katha. In your imaginary world, while jumping on the bed, tumbling on the sofa, fighting treacherous villains who exist only in your head, you are all powerful, anything is possible and then...you grow up. You start playing with kids of your age. You have your first brushes with organized competitive sport like cricket and football. You begin to realize that there are others who better than you, that older boys seem to be stronger, but then your spirit is still not fully broken. The imaginary world refuses to let go. You still believe that you are as good as Sachin Tendulkar, it's just that today was not your day, luck wasn't on your side, the day when you shall play that match winning innings is just around the corner. You keep chasing that dream all the way through middle school and the early years of high school and then.....you grow up. By now, you probably have been rejected from every school team sports selection after making it past the first round, the realization that you are no good at sport slowly begins to sink in, but you keep trying. At the same time, suddenly, studies seem to be a big thing, not that they were not earlier (Indian middle-class kids have no escape), but now they seem to be really, really serious. Tutions, board exams, world-cup-cricket matches on TV, the odd crush - life passes through in a blur. Your board results come, you join a college, you don't have a clue about what's happening around you, yet you fall in line and follow and life continues to pass on like a blur. Your new super heroes are entrepreneurial geniuses like Bill Gates, rock-stars like Metallica, English premiership footballers, movie actors, nobel laureautes and all other icons of pop culture prevalent at your time. You try to emulate them in your mind till you well....grow up. You get a job, or sign up for higher studies and then get a job, all in all once you start working your reference points change once again. Now your super stars start becoming more real. After the initial months you realize that reaching CEO will take some time, the only option now is to put your head down and work (those who don't realize this soon enough, go through a lot of emotional anguish before they settle down to the worker ant mode). And so here I am, trying to come to terms with my limitations and ordinariness (now don't worry, I'm not heading for the window ledge to jump off, instead I'm writing this blog), trying to redefine my super heroes and idols, down-sizing them - should I aim to be like my boss, a country GM, nah, I should aim higher, try to become his boss, a regional GM and then....I grow up and get real...sigh...I'm only a consultant and even becoming a senior consultant is years away...reality sucks.

I should probably switch jobs and start writing tear-jerkers for Ekta Kapoor.

Parkour - Remember the Akshay Kumar Thums Up ad?

Parkour is a physical discipline that evolved in France in the 1980s. It started out with a bunch of city kids trying innovative ways to hop, skip and jump across obstacles that come in the way while moving around the city. The guiding principle is to figure out the most effecient way to get from point A to point B by employing well - hop, skips and jumps. Have a look for yourself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHyoKC3C0bg
Looks pretty similar to what I went through the last time I had to cross Bannerghatta Road :)

IPL vs ICL

You know what? ICL was better. It at least served as a platform for many local lads to step up to the limelight. The young Indian team in the ICL outplayed every other fancied team in the fray and won the cup. Players like Stuart Binny and Ambatti Rayudu emerged from obscurity. On this front at least, ICL did good on its so called intention to promote the interests of the game. On the other hand, IPL has been very disappointing in terms of promoting local talent. The IPL teams are packed with international cricketers, the ones you've got tired of seeing throughout the year. You get to see over-worked war horses dragging their feet on dusty, crumbling pitches with no sense of purpose or direction. You feel a sense of pity when you the likes of Bret Lee running in to get hit out of the park in an itsy-bitsy encounter.....if ever there was something called over-exposure killing the golden goose, this is it.

Life..

Another death in the family. A young boy of 18 years. My first cousin’s son. The family had gone to a resort for a holiday after his second PU exams got over. While swimming he cramped up and drowned. There were no lifeguards to help him. It took a while for a motley crew of waiters and visitors to pull him out of the water. They couldn’t save him. A tragedy beyond description.

Incidents like these make you realize the triviality of life. If you are destined to go, you go. It maybe now, it could be tomorrow, it might be a week later. All other worries and foibles seem so trivial. I often worry about work, pressures at office, my yearning to live abroad, all these seem so small.

Live your life happily. Be nice to your loved ones. Be happy. Smile. Living every day like it were your last day might be a tall order, but certainly don’t live like you had forever. You never know…

Cricket, sport, spirit

One solid learning for me from India's famous win against Australia was that,
" in sport, and likewise in life, attitude and spirit matter more than ability and reputation."

A motely-bunch of 20-25 year olds....pulled the rug from beneath the feet of the vaulted world champions.....the only thing that folks like Praveen Kumar had going for them was the comfort of anonimity and arrogance of youth...dropping the highly reputed Rahul Dravid and Saurav Ganguly, not only reduced the average age of the team but also increased its fearlessness quotient.....Dhoni's blokes had nothing to lose and it showed in the way they played on the field..

It is interesting to note that Dhoni's team seems to mimic the way Dhoni plays his cricket. Dhoni is not supremely talented in terms of wicket-keeping and batting. He is at best, effecient at both, but not magical. What makes him tick is his street-smartness, grit and no-frills approach to the game. His team is similar. Barring the gifted Ishant Sharma and the masterful Sachin, all its stars including Rohit Sharma, Piyush Chawla, Robin Uthappa and Praveen Kumar are effecient cricketers, but by no means prodigies.

In the same manner, don't you know people with average abilities who make it big in life. I for one am a firm believer that the general populace is blessed with the same talent and intelligence, there might be exceptions here and there, but overall it's an even playing field. The ones who eventually succeed, seem to be the ones with that extra grit, determination and conquering spirit.