I thought so after reading this article...

For India's Youth,
New Money Fuels
A Revolution

As Foreign Goods, Jobs Flood
The Country, Young People
Are Spurning Tradition

By JOANNA SLATER
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL


BOMBAY, India -- Late at night, Nisha Kalro goes to work dialing Americans and urging them to pay their overdue credit-card bills. Her family finds her career choice unsettling. "There are still people who do not know what a call center is and have the wrong impression," says Ms. Kalro's mother, Sheela, adjusting her red-and-black sari. In her day, she says, women who worked at night were presumed to be call girls, not call-center workers.

To Nisha, 25 years old, her family is stuck in an outdated India of arranged marriages, excessive deference and rigid notions of fate. "What my parents want is simple; it's for me to get married," says Ms. Kalro. "But marriage and me will never mix."

As outsourced jobs pour into India, they are bringing much more than money to this nation of one billion. They are also creating a young, affluent class absorbing Western attitudes at the office, far from parental supervision. The independence of these twentysomethings is helping to unravel time-honored social mores in India, where young people are expected to marry someone their parents choose and live with an extended family. The idea of women working at night was unthinkable until recently.


The social shifts go hand-in-hand with huge economic change. Ms. Kalro's parents grew up under a socialist-inspired system that kept out foreign goods and stifled competition. There were only two brands of car, a new telephone line meant a yearlong wait, and state-run television ruled the airwaves. Starting in 1991, India dismantled the system, and a flood of imported products followed -- from cellphones to Ford Motor Co. sport-utility vehicles to eagerly awaited broadcasts of "Friends." Foreign companies began sending jobs here to take advantage of less-expensive labor.

With all of it came foreign attitudes and behavior. Young people such as Ms. Kalro prefer to spend, not save. They chat on cellphones, buy using credit cards, zip around on motorcycles and eat out at restaurants or cafes. And they are targeted relentlessly by companies that have long waited to see India develop a Western-style consumer class.

"I call these kids 'liberalization children,' " says Rama Bijapurkar, a Bombay-based marketing consultant who sits on the board of Indian software giant Infosys Technologies. "This generation has a hunger in the belly for achievement and all the good things money can buy."

India's economy is set to grow at least 7% this year through March, thanks to a resurgent manufacturing industry and a sizzling service sector. Some parts of the economy are expanding far faster, including consumer lending and the outsourcing industry, which runs the gamut from software development to call centers to claims processing.

The changes aren't happening everywhere. Agriculture dominates the vast countryside. Large parts of the country are mired in poverty. And India continues to be closed in certain ways: Foreign retailers still aren't allowed to invest in the country, for example.

But each month, the outsourcing wave gathers up more upwardly mobile young people, from Bombay and New Delhi to Bangalore and lesser-known Indian cities. More than 170,000 people work in the $2.3 billion call-center and back-office industry. Another half-million are employed in information technology.

Nowhere is the cultural transformation more intense than among call-center workers, mostly in their 20s, who spend their nights working for companies such as American Express Co., Dell Inc. and Citigroup Inc. The centers largely recruit fresh graduates from India's colleges or technical schools, looking for outgoing English speakers willing to work nights.

For many young people, especially women, call-center work means money, independence and an informal environment where they can wear and say what they like. Along with training in American accents and geography, India's legions of call-center employees are absorbing new ideas about family, material possessions and romance.

Frederick Hamilton, a manager at Wipro Spectramind, India's largest call-center company, says the father of a young female employee recently came to him with suspicions that she was secretly dating someone at the office. "He said, 'Her values have changed, and I blame it on this business,' " recalls Mr. Hamilton. "Parents think they've brought up their children well, with conservative values -- and a year later they come back hip."

Nikesh Soares, who worked at Wipro last year, was a "little gentleman" before he got into the call-center business a little over three years ago, according to his mother, Alisha. He wore button-down shirts and refused to wear sandals, even in Bombay's sultry weather. He wouldn't watch Hollywood movies because of all the "sex and smooching," he says. He knew exactly the kind of woman he was going to marry: demure and old-fashioned.


Today, the 29-year-old Mr. Soares says, "The only thing that hasn't changed is my haircut."

His outlook began to change when he joined eFunds, a Bombay call center, in 2000. Each night, he answered calls from Americans responding to infomercials, selling them tummy crunchers, diet pills, miniature rotisseries and orthopedic insoles. The $220-a-month salary -- more than double his wages at previous jobs -- was a revelation, as was the company of fun-loving colleagues his own age.

Telling his mother he had to work late, he and his friends headed for all-night bars and drank until dawn before stumbling home for a few hours' sleep. "Girls do it also," he says. "They say they're working when they're actually out with their boyfriends."

Mr. Soares married one of those girls, Sophia D'Souza, who sat in the next cubicle and didn't hesitate to strike up a conversation. With an independent streak and a preference for jeans, she is neither demure nor old-fashioned. "My friends all say, 'Nikesh, what happened? We thought you wanted someone traditional,' " he laughs.

In a culture where women rarely wear shorts or skirts above the knee, the work itself was an eye-opener. Mr. Soares and his future wife found themselves fielding calls from people who wanted to buy "Girls Gone Wild," a hit video featuring scantily clad or topless young women frolicking on vacation. One night, a father called from the U.S. to buy the video as a birthday present for his college-age son, something Mr. Soares could never imagine an Indian parent doing.

Outside the office, it was a different world. When Mr. Soares picked up his wife on his motorbike at the end of the shift, sometimes the police stopped them and asked what they were doing out so late.

Ms. D'Souza saw colleagues shear off their long hair and trade traditional salwar kameez -- a loose-fitting tunic over pants -- for tight tops. When Mr. Soares announced that he and Sophia were getting married, he told his mother that they planned to buy an apartment and live on their own, despite her strenuous objections. His mother had assumed they'd all live together, as her extended family did when she was a child.

With Mr. Soares and his wife each earning about $250 a month, the couple secured a loan to buy a simple but sunny two-bedroom apartment in one of Bombay's far-flung suburbs.

In the U.S., "there is this idea that at 18 years old, you go out, work, and parents don't interfere," says Mr. Soares, who like most call-center workers has never left India. "I think that is very excellent."

To his mother, it felt like abandonment. "I felt a part of my life was gone," she says. She also faces the possibility of losing another son: Mr. Soares's 18-year-old brother also works at a call center and is becoming more independent.

Arundhati Roy, a novelist and activist in India, sounds a broader concern. Call centers, she argues, strip young Indian workers of their cultural identities -- by making them use American names on the phone, for example. Ms. Roy wrote in India's Outlook magazine in 2000 that the centers show "how easily an ancient civilization can be made to abase itself completely."

Increasingly, call centers are becoming sensitive to the change they are effecting. Some have instituted "family days" where they throw open their doors to their staff's relatives in an effort to dispel any lingering doubts about where their children go at night.

When Nisha Kalro arrived at the office on a recent evening, many of her colleagues were standing in the stairwell, smoking before the start of their shift. (She asked that her company not be named for fear it could affect her job.) One young man with an earring, goatee and jeans talked about his part-time job as a hip-hop DJ. Conversation bubbled around plans for the weekend and the potential for getting better salaries at other call centers.

Rising out of a run-down Bombay suburb, Ms. Kalro's office is part of a brand-new cluster of call centers that comes to life after sunset. On an open floor, some 300 employees sit in front of computer screens amid a constant hum of voices. Some have taken off their shoes. Others stand and talk into their headsets as they pace around their desk.

On a slow night, there's time between calls to gossip in a mix of rapid-fire English and Hindi -- about their last customer, their boss or who's seeing whom at the office.

"He claimed he was driving and couldn't pull over" to talk, mutters one 22-year-old woman about her latest call to someone in California who's late on a credit-card payment. The young man next to her leans over and asks whether that's a hickey on a supervisor's cheek, sending them both into peals of laughter. They discuss plans to meet at an all-night eatery for breakfast when the shift ends at 4:30 a.m.

Seconds later, they're calmly urging Americans to pay overdue balances. "Have a wonderful day, you take care," says the young woman, her Indian accent flattened out enough to sound plausibly American.

On breaks, employees pour out into the cafeteria, where music videos play on a wall-mounted television screen. Others gather on the leather couches in the lobby to chat and make calls on their cellphones. At 1 a.m., Ms. Kalro and a friend use a break to step outside the building, walking around the small garden in the compound and swatting away mosquitoes.

Sitting in a cafe around the corner from the call center after her shift, a Britney Spears song blaring in the background, Ms. Kalro says that some of her friends are now pushing the envelope of accepted behavior.

One of her friends not only rejected the mate her family had chosen for her, but began dating a colleague from a different religious background -- she's Sikh and he is Muslim -- without her parents' knowledge. In an incident now legendary among Bombay's call-center workers, three young employees -- two men and a woman -- were recently found in a compromising position on a terrace at one suburban office. They were fired.

Sometimes, it is all too much for a generation that still decries public kissing. At an outsourcing center in Madras, a deeply conservative city in Southern India, two distressed parents recently showed up in the reception area demanding to take their daughter home, according to a manager there. The parents had just discovered she had been having an affair with an older colleague. They were later persuaded to let her keep working.

Ms. Kalro says she isn't dating anyone at the moment. She has other ambitions. She's just received a sought-after promotion, and if that doesn't go well, she would consider moving to Dubai, where salaries are higher for similar work. Such prospects take her further and further away from her mother's world.

Every afternoon, the 52-year-old Mrs. Kalro spends a couple of hours at the small Hindu temple near her home, lighting prayer lamps and singing hymns. The rest of her day is spent cooking meals for the extended family, which includes an elderly mother-in-law and her husband's three siblings.

The idea holds no appeal for her daughter. "I want to be working and standing on my own two feet," says Nisha. "I tell my mother, 'I would never be able to live your life.' "

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"Future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams"

So what are we discussing here ?

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What goes around comes around...
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A CANADIAN INDIAN

No place on this earth is best place to raise children. For proper development and growth of your children into young responsible human being, major role is for the parents. If they do their job sincerely, children will be fine everywhere.

Children are just like mud, artist use to make pottery. So if creater is serious and sincere in his job, it is sure that result will be good.

Basic principles for parenthood.

1. Be caring parent
2. Be friend to your child
3. Play and talk to them
4. Do not avoid them
5. share your experiences with them
6. Present an example to them
7. Show them the true color of universe in a practical manner
8. Be explorer and take them with you.
9. maintain good social and family relations
10. Remain informed and keep them informed

I hope this helps

There is no place better than India to raise your kids in traditional Indian way.
Thanks and regards.
Biomed

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"Change before you have to" : Jack Welch

Quote:

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Orginally posted by biomed

There is no place better than India to raise your kids in traditional Indian way.
Thanks and regards.
Biomed

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What exactly is an "Indian Way" ???

Sanjeevkumar has pointed out good ... just teach them to speak their Mind.

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