Life is…My thoughts…

Someone’s comment on youtube on a video of Atta Ullah Khan:

While reading editorials one thing that always strikes my mind is that what part of it is close to truth and what part is just what the writer thinks. A week back or so i read an article in Times of India and it just made me almost go mad. So to release some frustration and comment on what the reality is, thought of writing a post. I am just taking quotes from the article and posting comments on them. Your comments are welcome 

Back in 2002, India claimed to produce 350,000 engineers per year. But this included “diploma engineers” who were not true engineers at all. India actually had only 102,000 real engineering graduates in 2002. This went up to 222,000 in 2006 and may be double that in 2011.

Yes ! That was dependent upon number of colleges. When IT was booming after recession in 2004, Comp Engg was a hot cake so Engg College an awesome business. That is what gave rise to opening of engineering colleges like karyana shops.

India does have some excellent engineering schools, but McKinsey estimates that only 25% of Indian engineering graduates are good enough to work for multinationals (and only 15% of finance graduates and 10% of those with degrees of any kind).

Yes true again because these are not collegses. There are currency printing shops. They are charging high fees and collecting some good money. Who cares about the quality and standard of the education provided ?

Yet in 2007, India’s five largest IT services companies added 120,000 engineering jobs, and IBM and Accenture added another 14,000. Pharma R&D companies boomed. And foreign car companies made India an export and R&D hub to capitalize on its engineering skills.

Because the IT work was being outsourced to India like anything and Indian companies needed to show employee strength to catch those projects. They needed the head count and the easiest way to get that was to go to campus and hire masses.

In recruitment, Indian companies stopped looking at resumes. Good resumes often reflect an ability to write good resumes, not real skills. Instead, Indian companies put applicants through psychometric tests and rigorous interviews to identify general abilities and aptitude, rather than specialized skills. Instead of hiring only from elite engineering colleges, companies like Infosys and TCS recruited from second- and third-tier colleges, and also from arts and science schools.

Bullshit ! Perhaps, except top institues like IIT and others, where else the graduates know how to make their CVs. Almost all of them look the same, talking about some small projects done there and other academic details.

Multinationals preferred to recruit people with established skills. But Indian companies realized that recruits had to be trained from scratch. Many companies virtually became universities, employing hundreds of trainers.The Infosys Global Education Centre at Mysore trains 13,500 people at a time. For arts and science recruits, TCS provides an additional three months of training. In all, many recruits get four to seven months of training before starting work.

So, as per the author, this is the real juice but in reality its such a superior quality bullshit that you won’t believe it. First thing, only biggies can afford to send people on tranings for months (And boy that has been reduced to 1/3 or less, in the name of cost cutting). Second important thing is that in which company people are trained & made to work on the same technology ? Whatever little i have come across in 6 years of my careers is that A is trained on Technology X, made to work on Y; B is trained on Y made to work on Z; C is trained on Z, made to sit on bench. Where the heck do you see that knowledge grabbed from the tranining being used ? Its almost nowhere. And id you saw it somewhere, that must be accidental.

This would be impossibly expensive in the West. It is economic in India. Thus, low-cost training has been transformed into an international advantage, giving India a competitive edge in high-tech exports.

Cheap labor ! Thats it !

Training is a continuous process, not just in technical issues but also in management skills, quality consciousness, communications, foreign language and personal-effectiveness skills. Companies commonly mandate one to four weeks of yearly training. The career development and salaries of staff are linked to skills acquired from training. Mentorship by senior executives is another key Indian practice. Cadence India has a “leaders-as-teachers” program: every manager must spend one to two weeks teaching internal classes. Even the CEO is not exempt.

What the heck ?

Managers are groomed through fast-track programs for the best-performing employees, who then get preference for promotion. Once, Indian companies desperately sought foreign-returned managers. Today, they can find better talent locally. Returnees from abroad can have a hard time getting a good job.

Hahaha..lol…

Employees get reviewed at the end of every project and are prescribed training if found to have weaknesses. Mechanisms such as 360-degree reviews (wherein you review your bosses and peers) and balanced scorecard reviews are widely used.

360 degree reviews ? Dude say something against your manager and see your rating. You would come to know what this 360 degree shit is !!!

Managers are evaluated on a variety of non-financial measures, including employee satisfaction, attrition rates and mentoring.

Another factor that is missed is that how much a manager can butter his boss !

The software industry complains of a high attrition rate — up to 30% employees leave every year. But this means that companies end up training people not just for themselves but for the whole industry. That is one more secret of India’s success.

Money dude ! People can get good money by changing jobs every year. So that drives the attrition rates !

Enough of crap. No more energy left in me. So leaving it here for your judgment considering what the reality is !

And see; this article was published in Times of India, India’s so called No 1 English newspaper. And someone who is not aware of the actual situation in Indian IT would think that don’t know what kind of high-tech rocket making India was into .

I wanted to write this post in some different way but, just a change of mind. Now i will just post what i saw.

Today we went to the International Book Fair at Pragati Maidan. Few of the observations:

1. At none of the gate it was mentioned that where the tickets were available and from which gate was the entry for book fair. As far as i am aware this information is not available online as well.
2. After entering from the main gate there was no information about in what all halls book stalls were being hosted ?
3. No single board telling what all publishers were there.
4. There are maps near landmarks in the province (but some of them probably without “You are here” mark) telling about the locations of various halls but after reaching in front of a hall, you wont be able to tell anything about it as there is not a single board telling about its name or number.
5. There was no question of any support staff being there/helping you.
6. Least number of sign-boards so that you take the longest route for reaching from one place to another.
7. Every possible eatable thing was over-priced. (An OK types paneer kulcha for Rs 40 and a plate of gol-gappas (6 pieces) for Rs 15).

May be i am missing something…for now…that is it !

I had to get the third party transfer option enabled in my HDFC bank account and that needs you to fill a form and submit it to some branch. So I went to HDFC bank nearby and asked for the form. For the first time in my life probably, it was a really simple form. Just 3-4 required fields and that is it. Though there was one little thing that can be pointed out. They asked for customer ID which is not as common thing as account number. But the lady at the counter asked me to write account number only. So problem solved. It was really a rare example of good experience of “going to a bank”  . Wish all the bank related things were that simple .

Cheers !!!

I go to Gurudwara, once in 2-3 months. That means I am not really a religious person. Period ! But from what I see around, I think people are way better. They go to Temple/Gurudwara/Mosque daily and some even twice in a day. But what leaves me wondering is the other side of  the coin. That is their behaviour in their lives. They are fully dedicated to these religious practices but when it comes to applying the teachings in their daily lives; NO…it is nowhere to be seen. And often I put this very same question to everyone who talks about this religious commitment thing and the answer is …but still…he does go to Gurdwara/Temple daily. I mean one doesn’t go for the sake of going. It is for your betterment, to learn to be good and do good. If you aren’t ready to follow what religion teaches then what is the use of going ? Are you trying to fool God ?

How similar or different they are ?

Mera Bharat Mahan !

Have you ever observed that the feeling of slavery (in Indians) has not completely gone ? It still runs in our blood. That pleasing-the-master feeling, habits and the nature just don’t away. Being in corporate sector, I can relate it to so many things happening daily. Just few of the common observations:

• How difficult it is to say NO to your boss ?
• How comfortable most of the people are in expressing their “personal life” needs ?
• How much buttering-of-the-boss happens in most of the companies ?
• How we never say NO to the client because he pays us !
• How we are made to work on Saturdays, Sundays and late evenings and we don’t have the guts to say NO !
• How we don’t have the guts to call a wrong a wrong !
• How stupidly we think that if we don’t agree to what the guy sitting in front of us says, he will feel bad !

And so many other things. Is there a hope that India would get rid of all this ?

Actually Aman won the game and he posted it before me. So i am not going to talk about the usual stuff . It was my long time wish to go to Vasant Vihar and see the Emporio Mall. There are 2 malls actually; one is DLF place and another Emporio Mall. DLF place, i would say is just like any other mall, hosting all the normal brands and all. As we all were first timers, we came out missing the hi-fi-ness about the place and then noticed the entrance to Emporio mall. Man it is, i guess the poshest mall in Delhi. The brands, restaurants and other stuff, i have almost never heard about. And the prices were totally jaw dropping. We had glimpse of all the three floors and each one was more amazing than the other. Finally feeling how rich India was, we came back smiling. Took an auto from there (oh yes we middle class, the mango people ) and reached home.

And almost just after coming out, there was “other” India for you to see .

After I came out of Punjab, I was met with a new caste(caste or what ?)-describing-terminology “ladka/ladki Punjabi hai”. No such thing was there in Punjab. It was Jatt/Ramgarhia…in Sikhs, Pandit/Baniya/Khatri… in Hindus and so on. It was after coming to Delhi that i heard about this new thing that ladka/ladki Punjabi hai. What annoys me the most is that everybody living in Punjab is a Punjabi so what this classification is ? For me, to best of my knowledge being Punjabi means you/your ancestors belong to Punjab. Let it be a Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Christian or anyone else. So what does this definition mean ? Can someone shed some light ?

Update: To clear the confusion, if any, I don’t want to highlight any caste or anything like that. Just wanted to know what exactly people mean by this ?

The complete title of the post is We Indians…

Most of the time there are cars parked in front of our apartment and there is very little space to enter the door to stairs. Today when i came back from office and was entering the apartment there was an uncle standing with his back leaning with one of the cars and doing something on his mobile. There was hardly any space left to cross. Me and 2 of my roommates had to cross but that uncle didn’t move a bit but was rather doing left and right to make some space in pretty much ignorance. A thought hit me that how egoistic (or stupid ? ) we Indians are ? Just few of the things i observe almost daily:

1. The very first thing, the above example. What he would have lost if he had come out to give us some space to cross ? And this is not the only scenario. Its so common in our daily lives.
2. While entering any office, mall or any other place, if there is a guard or some security staff asking us a question, see how hot our blood gets in fraction of moment whereas they just do their duty.
3. In our daily lives, just observe how we talk to our maids, servants or the guys working on the shops where we go for getting our daily needs stuff ?
4. We make a mistake on the road while driving and the other guy says something, how fast we come down to maan…bhain and my uncle is this and that.
5. Similarly we violate a traffic rule and the traffic policy guy asks us few questions and issues a ticket. How we start making calls to someone sitting on a high post known to us ?

These are just few things that are coming to my mind right now. There would be so many of them. If you can think of some more, please leave a comment.

Then we say that we are the most humble, God fearing blah blah people on this planet. What is this then ?