Just sharing a news item from today's Indian Express : NO CONTROVERSIES PLEASE


http://www.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=50634&headline=West~dying:~'Their~kids~will~have~to~learn~Hindi'

West dying: 'Their kids will have to learn Hindi'
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Harish Dugh
Posted online: Thursday, July 14, 2005 at 1008 hours IST
Updated: Thursday, July 14, 2005 at 1016 hours IST

New Delhi, July 14: The world today for the jet-setting Indians (NRIs) stands at the crossroads. They travelled to the West, braving all odds. Made their money - as US-, UK, et al Indians. And just when these Indians thought they could rest on their good fortunes the pesky relatives back in mother country stole the jobs that were as American and European as the Caucasian skin. For the Indians, the new era of outsourcing may just have signalled another migration - back to India!

The Earth is a very big orb made very small by human endeavour is being proved with an increasing number of Indians trudging back to mother country because the West is dying and no longer holds the forth the dreams of affluence of yore.

Everyday changes have wrought a transformation that makes the high-flying son of Indian immigrant parents to US debate the metamorphosis that may force his Americanised kids to learn Hindi because American jobs are flying through the window to Bharat.

Will an Indian-turned-American see his children spin the clock back, but this time into the future, and become Indians-turned-Americans-turned Indians?

The New York Times in its Op/Ed page says that, 'According to a confidential memorandum, IBM is cutting 13,000 jobs in the United States and in Europe and creating 14,000 jobs in India. From 2000 to 2015, an estimated three million American jobs will have been outsourced; one in 10 technology jobs will leave these shores by the end of this year. Stories like these have aroused a primal fear in the Western public: that they might soon need to line up outside the Indian Embassy for work visas and their children will have to learn Hindi.

Just as my parents had to line up outside the American consulate in Bombay, and my sisters and I had to learn English. My father came to America in 1977 not for its political freedoms or its way of life, but for the hope of a better economic future for his children. My grandfathers on both sides left rural Gujarat in north-western India to find work: one to Calcutta, which was even more remote in those days than New York is from Bombay now; and the other to Nairobi. Mobility, we have always known, is survival. Now I face the possibility that my children, when they grow up, will find their jobs outsourced to the very country their grandfather left to pursue economic opportunity.

An economically rising India has seen a change of fortunes wherein the very foundations of the Western world's economic strength and well-being has been challenged. India in short has risen up from a country of snake charmers and poverty to one of a near-term superpower who has wrested the power of optimism from the US and allies and with it perhaps put the reigns of the world's future in sub-continental hands to a large extent.

What started it: Outsourcing!
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It has bred confusion, angst, self-questioning, perhaps even a look back in anger.

The NYT's Suketu Mehta says, 'The outsourcing debate seems to have mutated into a contest between the country of my birth and the country of my nationality. Of course I feel a loyalty to America: it gave my parents a new life and my sons were born here. I have a vested interest in seeing America prosper. But I am here because the country of my ancestors didn't understand the changing world; it couldn't change its technology and its philosophy and its notions of social mobility fast enough to fight off the European colonists, who won not so much with the might of advanced weaponry as with the clear logical philosophy of the Enlightenment. Their systems of thinking conquered our own. So, since Independence, Indians have had to learn; we have had to slog for long hours in the classroom while the children of other countries went out to play.

When I moved to Queens, in New York City, at the age of 14, I found myself, for the first time in my life, considered good at math. In Bombay, math was my worst subject, and I regularly found my place near the bottom of the class rankings in that rigorous subject. But in my American school, so low were their standards that I was - to my parents' disbelief - near the top of the class. It was the same in English and, unexpectedly, in American history, for my school in Bombay included a detailed study of the American Revolution. My American school curriculum had, of course, almost nothing on the subcontinent's freedom struggle. I was mercilessly bullied during the 1979-80 hostage crisis, because my classmates couldn't tell the difference between Iran and India. If I were now to move with my family to India, my children - who go to one of the best private schools in New York - would have to take remedial math and science courses to get into a good school in Bombay.

Every Indian who left his village or hamlet for the bright lights and big fortunes of the city, and did not make his fame and fortune, indulges in self-flagellation, especially if the relatives he left behind get enriched from locally sourced business. Poverty is a huge black hole in the Indian economy and it is found in the middle of the rich metropolis as well as in the most rustic of villages.

However, as NYT says, 'Of course, India's no wonderland. It might soon have the world's biggest middle class, but it also has the world's largest underclass. A quarter of its one billion people live below the poverty line, 40 per cent are illiterate, and the child malnutrition rate exceeds that of sub-Saharan Africa. There's a huge difference between the backwater state of Bihar and the boomtown of Bangalore. Those Indians who went to the United States, though, have done remarkably well: Indians make up one of the richest ethnic groups in this country. During the technology boom of the late 1990's, Indians were responsible for 10 per cent of all the start-ups in Silicon Valley. And in this year's national spelling bee, the top four contestants were of South Asian origin.

There is a perverse hypocrisy about the whole jobs debate, especially in Europe. The colonial powers invaded countries like India and China, pillaged them of their treasures and commodities and made sure their industries weren't allowed to develop, so they would stay impoverished and unable to compete. Then the imperialists complained when the destitute people of the former colonies came to their shores to clean their toilets and dig their sewers; they complained when later generations came to earn high wages as doctors and engineers; and now they're complaining when their jobs are being lost to children of the empire who are working harder than they are. My grandfather was once confronted by an elderly Englishman in a London park who asked, 'Why are you here? ' My grandfather responded, 'We are the creditors. ' We are here because you were there.

The Western world has shown that it is not only aging, its youth is also tiring of any kind of toil, even the most easy ones that at the most requires the fingers to tap on the PC keyboard to learn how to make software, or any other job. This is the air-conditioned nightmare of development - an ossified population that has such a good life it loses all urgency to work hard. So we see the Europeans fight tooth and nail for a 30-hour week, or else…. Even schooling is a major ordeal for the all-American average kid. So if the 24/7 as well as 365-days-a-year hard-working Indian goes ahead and does it all, lets life by-pass him to earn his millions, why does the white man rage?

Do they not realise that what has happened to the West is most probably going to happen to India too? That soon Indian corporates are going to find out that if they start outsourcing too to, perhaps, Burma, they can get the job done at half the cost that an Indian worker demands.

NYT says, 'The rich countries can't have it both ways. They can't provide huge subsidies for their agricultural conglomerates and complain when Indians who can't make a living on their farms then go to the cities and study computers and take away their jobs. Why are Indians willing to write code for a tenth of what Americans make for the same work? It's not by choice; it's because they're still struggling to stand on their feet after 200 years of colonial rule. The day will soon come when Indian companies will find that it's cheaper to hire computer programmers in Sri Lanka, and then it's there that the Indian jobs will go.

Of course, it's heart wrenching to see American programmers - many of whom are of Indian origin - lose their jobs and have to worry about how they'll pay the mortgage. But they are ill served by politicians who promise to bring their jobs back by the facile tactic of banning them from leaving. This strategy will ensure only that our schools stay terrible; it'll be an entire country run like the dairy industry, feasible only because of price controls and subsidies.

Lighting a spark of hope for the future NYT adds, 'But we have a resource of incalculable worth right here to help us compete: the immigrants who've been given a new life in America. There are many more Indians in the United States than there are Americans in India. Indian-Americans will help America understand India, trade with it to our mutual benefit. Just as Arab-Americans can help us fight Al Qaeda, Indian-Americans can help us deal with the emerging economic superpower that is India. This is the return of the gift of citizenship.

And just in case, I'm making sure my children learn Hindi.
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According to Hindu scriptures the world goes through cyclical stages. But only those survive who have the intelligence to fathom the present and read the future. While Indians paid a huge price for not doing either in the medieval times and later, allowing foreigners to rule the country, yet the pain of poverty has made the people the smartest on Earth. They have shown over the last fifty years or so that they have the ability to do both and prosper.

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Pramod Chopra
Senior Mortgage Consultant
Mortgage Alliance Company of Canada

I would feel proud the day when people from foreign countries have to line up outside india for work visas but i dont think that is going to happen soon. It might happen eventually if our population is controlled.

Not all the people who come here have only economic prosperity on their mind,things like political freedom, religious freedom and may be even be sexual orientation- reasons are plenty

Just curious .......how long is it going to take us before we forget the whole colonisation thing and be proud of what we achieved during that time frame as well.

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"Progress comes from deviation".

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