Author Archives: manish

Indian companies hiring engineers in China

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This is fascinating: Indian outsourcing companies, caught short-staffed by surging sales, are subcontracting some of the work to China.

“We need a deep reservoir of talent as well as an alternative low-cost center like India as we continue to grow,” said Nandan Nilekani, chief executive of Infosys, who has talked of his company’s scaling up to become the Wal-Mart of outsourcing. “And only China can match up.”… China has some 200,000 information technology workers–compared with India’s 850,000–in 6,000 local companies… More than 50,000 Chinese software programmers are being added to this pool annually.

… even with wages rising in India, China’s information technology workers are more expensive “because a combination of English-language and technical skills is at a premium,” Nilekani of Infosys said.

So a country which couldn’t defeat its neighbor on the battlefield is employing it instead. And it’s all thanks to unwanted colonization by an empire which left behind its language. It’s not only the law of unintended consequences, it’s also slick jujitsu.

Desi mayor voted to ban ‘Midnight’s Children’

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Dr. Mohammed Ali Chaudry was elected mayor of Basking Ridge / Bernards Township, New Jersey last year. He may be the first Pakistani-American mayor in the U.S., an achievement we should be proud of.

Sahiwal born Dr. Chaudhry left Pakistan in 1963 to study at London School of Economics, and…  came to United States in 1967 and earned a Ph. D. in Economics from Tufts University…

However, Chaudry also voted to ban Midnight’s Children in local schools while on the local board of education, possibly driven by antipathy dating back to The Satanic Verses. One desi voter who couldn’t read the book in his high school English class was so incensed that he cast a write-in vote (via liberal blog DailyKos) this morning for Salman Rushdie, who, to the best of my knowledge, is not running for Township Commissioner in Basking Ridge, New Jersey.

As soon as I saw his name on the ballot last week, I flipped out… My 11th grade English teacher wanted to teach the book Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie in the year’s curriculum. However, this Chaudry guy tried to ban it! He was relentless!… my whole family went with my teacher to contest the banning of Midnight’s Children… that was 10 years ago… My sister and I (as well as my mom and dad…) agreed to write in “Salman Rushdie” as Township Commissioner… I’d pay generously to see the steam rising from Mr. Chaudry’s head.

Chaudry is probably also the first mayor to use an instant messaging video feed to attend a city council meeting from Pakistan:

“I had a friend who had a cable modem in Lahore and a camera set up so the Council could see my picture on the screen and I could see the Council. A landmark, I was very pleased with that. The beauty of this was it did not cost the Council a single penny.”

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World’s biggest steel company will be desi-owned

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London-based billionaire Lakshmi Mittal and his son Aditya are planning a $17.8B acquisition of an Ohio company which will make Mittal Steel the world’s biggest:

Last week, in a complicated $17.8 billion deal, Indian entrepreneur Lakshmi Mittal said he would merge his existing steel assets — the privately-held LNM Holdings and the publicly-traded Ispat International — with the U.S.-based International Steel Group (ISG). The deal, which must still gain regulatory approval, would create the world’s biggest steel company, Mittal Steel, to be based in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and help Mittal pursue his modest goal of making Mittal as synonymous with steel as Ford is with the motor car. The new company could produce up to 10% of the world’s steel…

Mittal made his $6.8B fortune in steel mills all over the world, including Calcutta, Romania, Mexico and Kazakhstan. Ironically, Mittal no longer owns any steel mills in India itself.

He has been able to generate profits by using his scale to buy lower-cost raw materials and by importing modern management techniques into previously inefficient state-run mills.

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Anniversary of Indira Gandhi’s death

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Indians flocked to former PM Indira Gandhi’s bungalow in Delhi today on the 20th anniversary of her assassination (thanks, Sapna):

Indira Gandhi lived in the 1,300-sq-ft bungalow on the leafy and wide Safdarjung Road for nearly 20 years… “Till 1971, this must have been the smallest house of any prime minister in the world,” says the memorial’s curator Vijay Puri Goswami.

On display is Mrs Gandhi’s blood stained and bullet pocked sari, bringing back memories of her violent end. Two bodyguards pumped 16 bullets into her when she was crossing a leafy pathway from her residence to the office for an interview with Peter Ustinov. The grassy pathway has now been covered in marble and covered with crystal. A sheet of clear glass marks the place where she fell to her assassin’s bullets…

Visitors also flock to see her wedding sari, which was woven from yarn spun by her father Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India… There are gifts from international leaders: a silver and onyx lacquer plate from Ho Chi Minh, a crystal memento from Yasser Arafat.

India: always on the right side of history. A new report on the anti-Sikh riots has been pushed back by two months:

Some of those responsible for the violence had been, and still were, members of the governing Congress Party… Seven government-appointed commissions which had investigated the massacres were either whitewashes, or had met with official obstruction… Up to 1,000 people are thought to have died in riots which erupted across India in the days following her murder, as Hindus took their revenge on Sikhs who were blamed for the assassination.

Despite the tyranny of Gandhi’s rule, it’s a macabre memory for a ghoulish day.

An economist waxes poetic about Bollywood

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Economist Tyler Cowen goes Bollycrazy on a visit to Delhi:

If you don’t already know Indian movies you should… Don’t think that Lagaan (or Satyajit Ray, for that matter) is the real thing, or that Blockbuster will do you any good. Cut to the songs. The use of color, cinematography, and orchestration of scenes will blow your mind. Allow yourself to be mesmerized. Compare them to your dreams at night, not to other movies you know, and pretend it is the only air-conditioned place in town.

I would go much, much further. There are only a couple of quality Bollywood films out every year, you’ll kiss a lot of frogs along the way. But the good ones handle emotion in a way far superior to that of the best of American cinema. Hollywood movies are rife with scenes which ought to be laden with emotion, but the filmmakers invariably affect a detached tone. And it’s not purposely understated, stoic or ironic detachment; it’s incompetent writing, it’s wooden and absurd.

You’ll often see a mother sending her son off to war or certain death with a stiff ‘you must go now,’ cut, end of scene. There’s a fine line between avoiding schmaltz and copping out on emotion altogether. Mainstream American films often feel hollow, $100M in effects with atrocious writing, the blowdried-fake-tan-colored-contacts version of worship in the darkened temple of cinema. And so even fairly cerebral films with any emotional content at all (Sideways, Eternal Sunshine) seem like blazing, Oscar-worthy paragons of passion.

Is this just cultural? Probably, for the films explicitly pitched as Oscar bait; it reflects a culture with lower emotionality than desi culture. With mainstream films, in contrast, a major part of the problem is market consolidation. When you’re chasing high revenues, you inject high investment; when you’ve committed a lot of money, you target the broadest market; for the largest market, you talk only to the reptilian sub-brain with boobs and bombs. Finely-modulated emotions are too risky an investment.

Sorry, guys. I’ve already seen Bollywood.

Previous posts on Cowen’s India trip: 1, 2

Desi mom ejected from Bush rally

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A desi mother from Philadelphia was picking up tickets for her family at a Bush rally when she was ejected because her ride from work had a Kerry bumper sticker. Simi Nischal was picking up tickets for her husband Narinder, their son and daughter:

“The lady came in and said, ‘Who’s Simi?’ ” Nischal tearfully recalled Wednesday night, adding that she identified herself and was then refused tickets to the rally and escorted from the building.

Shortly after that, a man wearing a Bush-Cheney T-shirt confronted Nischal in the parking lot and told her to leave. “He was so rude, he made me feel like a criminal,” Nischal said. “I said, ‘That’s not fair, you are losing a supporter.’ [And he said], ‘We don’t care about your support.’ “

Nischal said onlookers cheered and laughed at her as she left the property. But that wasn’t the end of the insult, she said. She said another co-worker took her back to the gristmill to try to clear up the confusion, but she was again refused tickets…

Nischal said her daughter has been learning about the political process at school and has been a Bush supporter. She even picked up papers for her daughter to volunteer for the Bush campaign right before she was kicked out of the gristmill, she said.

Star-rupees

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Following the lead of Hooters, Starbucks says it will expand into India soon, trying to reverse hundreds of years of tea plantation history dating back to the East India Company (thanks, Super Jagjit!):

“China traditionally has been a tea-drinking country[,] but we turned them into coffee drinkers,” Schultz told a gathering of analysts earlier this month…

But their Asia marketing director, speaking not to Wall Street but to Indian consumers, is singing a gentler hymn:

“India is a tea-based culture. We””””re not saying coffee is a substitute. We””””re saying Starbucks is a place to hang out, to eat and drink, to see and be seen.”

In other words, a place to flirt. And, in fact, gourmet coffee cafes serve exactly that function in Indian cities today:

“With the liberalization of the economy, there are a large number of young Indians with good jobs and attractive incomes,” said Banerjee. “Many still live with their parents. So their income is largely disposable and they need to spend it on something.“

Methinks the key part of that quote is ‘many still live with their parents.’ Cafes function as extended living rooms in space-impaired Manhattan and as libidinous hotspots in privacy-impaired India. They’re just the place for your silken mocha pick-me-up.

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Short film about saffronization at IAAC film fest

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The short film ‘In Whose Name?’ by Nandini Sikand is screening Nov. 7 at the IAAC film festival in Manhattan. Shashwati Talukdar, the film’s editor, writes:

It explores the hijacking of “Indian Culture” by the right wing, something very disturbing to those of us who grew up loving the very things that took on a very sinister meaning down the road. Sometimes I wonder if I hadn’t learnt classical music and dance, this co-optation would have been as disturbing as it is.

Buy tickets for ‘In Whose Name?’ here and for the full film festival here.