The great Indian dream?

The Indian software industry killed my wardrobe and gave me the dressing sense of a 40-year-old white collar jobber. Now that I am back to school working towards a master's degree, I am surrounded by guys and girls a couple of years younger than me in their funky, funny-in-your-face-messaged tees, ripped-low-waisted-boot-cut jeans and I am in my formal coloured formal full hand shirt tucked in to my formal trousers and I am hit by a feeling of having rapidly aged. I tell myself that two years of software can't be that bad and get pulled into a round of profound introspection. And as a result, realisation dawns on me that it isn't just my wardrobe that got killed. Alongwith it has gone the ability to use my intellect, my social life, my hunger for challenges...I think I will just stop before it gets any more depressing.

All I have seen written about the IT and BPO sectors is what amazing contributions that they have made to the Indian economy. There has been the ocassional rant about the slave like work conditions in the call centres and the odd software engineer joke keeps floating around. But people are quick to jump to the defense of these sectors and how people working in them do it out of their own free will. The latter is one of the greatest myths afflicting the educated Indian populace. Sixty percent of IT and BPO employees take up the jobs not because they want to, but purely because they are the only jobs available in the booming Indian economy. Frankly speaking there is no denying the good that these sectors have done to the economy and the potential they have. But the downside to this, is the colossal waste of intellectual capital that keeps these sectors running. A vast majority of IT projects in India require little or no specialised skills, and most definitely do not require the skills of an engineer. Some of the brightest minds are recruited and made to do probably the most mind numbing work, like testing software or providing technical support for the client, both of which can be performed with great efficiency with skills acquired in a three month long course at any B-grade computer institute. A vast majority of engineers take up IT jobs with dreams of doing creative challenging work only to have it all come crashing down.

So what is my point, you may ask. My point is that the quality of work in BPOs and the IT industry does not demand the overskilled employee base it curently uses. My point is that there is an inherent subservience that runs in our blood, a possible vestige of colonial rule, that prevents us from thinking beyond the service industry as a money spinning option. The agression, drive and entrepreneurship that individuals showed in starting companies like Infosys, Wipro and TCS has been replaced by a complacent satisfaction at the lucrativeness of their current positions. The fact remains that the service industry is but the tip of a gold mine and there is much more money to be made by venturing into manufacturing. Helping Microsoft make software brings in money, but making the same software that Microsoft makes will bring in a lot more money. Twenty years agow, we would have had just the intellectual resources with little or no financial backing to make such ventures. But today the service industry has raked in enough money and the intelligent way to go, is not to just pump the money back into the same sector, but expand horizons and move into greener pastures. Otherwise the potential of one of the world's largest intellectual resource bases will remain untapped. The great Indian dream is when we realise that the moolah is not in merely polishing the shoes but in making the shoes ourselves. Speaking about shoes, its time to trade in my black ones for a pair of hep sneakers, its time for a wardrobe rebirth.......