Irritating Headlights!

I ride a bike and wear a helmet with visor. One of the most irritating things I encounter while on the roads is the high beam headlights of motorists in the nights. Most vehicles that I encounter in the roads in the city use high beam headlights which are actually meant for the highways. When the light from these headlights falls on the glass visor of the helmet, it spreads all over the glass surface and the glare is so much that one has to close his eyes till the vehicle from the opposite direction has past. Even if one manages to keep the eyes open, it is hardly useful as one cannot see anything in the road except the light beams. This forces one to slow down considerably in order to avoid an accident. Since such a thing keeps happening, it is highly irritating. I am sure a lot many accidents in the night would've been caused by such things.

Cars and two wheelers are equally guilty of using high beam headlights in the city. Apparently, motorists in India need to be educated in driving etiquettes such as this and others like lane changing. I hope that atleast the few readers of this blog will keep these things in mind and make the life of bikers and drivers in the generally bad Indian roads a little easier!

Enjoying every moment of IT!

A few days back I heard a colleague in office saying, “I am working in general insurance, my cousin is in health insurance, my sister is also in insurance. Only my brother in law is in retail. We are trying to convince him to join insurance too!”. A closer inspection of the conversation revealed that this person was implying that all his family members are working in the insurance domain of various IT companies.

We Indians are living in an era in which the demographics of middle class urban population is increasingly becoming homogenous. Almost every family has someone working in the IT sector. This is even more evident in the southern states. When you hear that a particular IT company hires over a thousand students from Anna University (which is around half of its student strength), you know that something strange is happening. As most of you know, I am talking about TCS which hired 1006 students from Anna University this June. TCS might as well consider setting up a strategic business unit for Anna University students. Incidentally this is not a one off case. Similar figures of campus placements have been emerging from many reputed engineering institutes in Tamil Nadu and other South Indian states. Things have come to such a state that the sole purpose of students enrolling for B.E. courses is now getting into the IT bandwagon.

The students or their parents are not the reason behind this phenomenon. They are simply reacting to the market situation. Who would want to pursue a career in electrical engineering today? Getting a job in the first place is itself difficult. Even if one manages to get into a decent company, the chances of his starting salary being more than that of his friends in Infosys and Wipro are extremely slim. To add to things, our electrical engineer most likely has a 6 day working week and has to spend a substantial part of his day in the workshop in the sweltering heat while his friend in Infosys is comfortable in his A/C cubicle, checking emails and chatting to friends. The Infosys friend also has pretty female colleagues around him to provide him with some entertainment. After two years of struggle and slogging, the electrical engineer proves his capabilities in his workplace. He gets good salary raises and is now proud to be earning almost twice his starting salary. But his ego comes crashing down when he sees that his Infy friend is now with Wipro and is earning thrice his starting salary. To add salt to the would, this guy announces that he is going to the US next month on a H1B visa. The only worry in his life is that he will be leaving behind his latest Wipro girlfriend. The electrical engineer comes home and finds that his parents have been unsuccessfully searching for a marriage alliance for him. The good candidates are either software engineers and prefer marrying another software engineer or they are not software engineers but still would prefer marrying a software engineer. The poor electrical engineer thinks that enough is enough and enrols himself for a Mainframes course.

We Indians are proud of our rich and diverse culture and heritage. But in 3000 A.D., archaeologists will find that urban India- especially southern India in circa 2000 – 2050 A.D. was a boringly bland society and was largely a softwarian (an analogy to agrarian) economy.

A serious issue

I saw an interesting article in ET today. According to the article, top IT companies in India like Infosys, Wipro, etc have decided to ask their employees to sign a non compete agreement. The gist of the agreement is that if an employee of any of the following companies- Infy, Wipro, TCS, Cognizant, Accenture, IBM- quits his job, then he/she is not free to join any other company from the above list for 6 months from the date of termination.

The link to the article is: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/2102946.cms

Such an agreement has serious implications to IT employees, who have fallen into the habit of changing companies every 18 months or so. There is no doubt that if this policy is comprehensively implemented then the sky high attrition levels in the Indian IT industry will fall drastically and will consequently help IT companies cut costs. But it also raises many important issues. The most important one is the issue of employee rights. An extract from the article: ‘Infosys Head (HR), Bikramjit Maitra, confirmed the move. He said the reason behind including only a few firms in the ‘named competition’ was to keep the terms reasonable and not restrict employment opportunities available to individuals

The present scenario in the Indian IT setup is such that around 70% of the market is dominated by the companies mentioned in the above list. So, if an employer decides to quit Infosys, his choice of a future employer will be severely restricted. He will have only 30% of the market to choose from. Of course, no one will consider sitting at home of 6 months. In such a scenario, this agreement will be a gross violation of the rights of an employee. It will also make IT companies to concentrate less on being employee friendly. At times like these one wonders if there is indeed a need for a union for IT employees. I seriously hope that voices are raised against such a policy.

Having said all this, my gut feeling is that ET, as usual, has gone overboard and has probably been inaccurate with its story. This thing sounds so ludicrous that it is hard to believe it. Perhaps the article fails to highlight some aspects of the story. Once all the aspects of the proposed contract are known, the story will be clearer.

Hi there!

This post is to assuage any fears of the readers (if there are any left!) that I may have left planet earth! Well, I am here and I am very much alive! I hope that this long hibernating blog will become much more active from now on.

Back to Cognizant!

The placement season is over and I am glad to announce that I have been placed. I will be going back to my old employer, Cognizant Technology Solutions. I will hopefully be put in the banking vertical and be located in Chennai. Thus ends the great quest of a job at the end of a MBA course. Well, the course is not over yet…but for all practical purposes, it has now lost its importance in our eyes. The placement week itself was more stressful than I had imagined. I thought I was very calm and composed and confident. But just one rejection shook me up and I realized how vulnerable I was to failure. I am forced to follow some protocols here which do not allow me to disclose which company I am talking about. This company came to campus about a week before the official placement week that started on 30^th Jan. And it wasn’t just me who was disappointed. Scores of others who were rejected were also dejected and depressed. I hadn’t imagined the kind of gloom and negativism that set in throughout the campus as companies started their pre processes and shortlists started coming in. We MBAs are supposed to be a self confident lot. But a lot of that is actually pretension. Placement season makes even the most self confident soul feel humble about himself.

By the time 30^th Jan arrived, I had regained my old self confidence. I knew that confidence, calmness and composure were the key to get through placements. And with the amount of preparations I had put in over the past few months, I knew that I could not rely on my knowledge- coz I don’t have much of it. So confidence and composure was very crucial. Thankfully things ended well and I ended up in the IT sector as I had wanted to. The interview itself was very cool. I had never expected it to be that way. The subject on which my knowledge was tested most was Formula One racing! I couldn’t have asked for a simpler interview. Anyway, I guess I got placed at the right moment. At around 7 pm people who were yet to be placed started getting anxious. Some cried- especially girls. The tension was explicitly palpable. I stuck around till my other room mate was placed. Then I quietly got down and took a drag and went back to the hostel.

By the end of the day, less than 20% of the batch was remaining to be placed. These guys were placed the next day. The placecom guys did a really commendable job. The first year students who handled the show were extremely good at their task and kept the inevitable confusions to minimum. The quality of the companies coming to campus was not compromised even till the last moment. Unlike the previous years there were no ‘bulk recruiters’ that took candidates in droves. Yet everyone got placed very fast. When placements ended, around 40 odd companies were yet to come! This speaks of two things- the marvelous effort of the placecom guys in convincing so many companies to come to campus, and the present crazy demand for MBA students from institutes like NMIMS by corporates. I guess the official placement statistics are not out yet. But the average salary this time will be substantially higher than last time’s figure. A look at the salary figures in top b schools over the past 5-6 years will give a mind boggling picture. Wage inflation is running up like crazy. It will have to stop at some point. At least the party hasn’t ended until I entered the dance floor!

Well, that was placements @ NMIMS for you. Now that it is all over, life is boring. But I am glad that I got most of what I wanted from placements. I am back at home now. I have a pleasant feeling going around in my head now which I would like to call- peaceful relaxation…

Guru

The latest movie by Mani Ratnam starts with a message which reads something like this:

ALL CHARACTERS IN THIS MOVIE ARE FICTITIOUS AND ANY RESEMBLANCE TO ANY PERSON DEAD OR ALIVE IS PURELY COINCIDENTAL

That message is crap. But the movie isn’t. The movie is not simply “inspired by Dhirubhai Ambani’s life”. It is as close to a biography of Mr. Ambani as Mani Ratnam could dare to make. The movie is very good and deserves to be seen by every Indian. Inspirational stuff, especially for aspiring entrepreneurs.

Like many other people, I had an opinion in which I used to see the Tatas as the ideal businessmen, full of ethics and values and I used to see Reliance as an example of how not to do business. This movie has made me think a bit on this and now I see things in a different light. I see that all is not black and white in this world. Sometimes breaking the law is not the wrong thing, in fact it is the right thing. To borrow a line from the movie, 70 years back a man broke the law of the land, and today we call him Bapu. Dhirubhai might have done a lot of things that may be termed as fraud or illegal or unethical. But he did what he did, in order to grow despite the stupid license - quota laws that were prevailing in the country at that time. When you put in your sweat and your hard earned money and risk it all to do business, it is but natural that you don’t want an illogical system to stop you.

Ambani was successful at a time when it was a sin to make huge amounts of money- unless you were rich with your forefathers’ wealth. Though he himself became hugely rich, he also made thousands of common shareholders rich. Not only that, he gave employment to a lot of people and inspired countless entrepreneurs. He gave confidence to businessmen across the country and played an important role in building the nation.

India is very lucky to have had Dhirubhai Ambani and others like him. To overcome all those odds and still succeed, takes guts and determination. Dhirubhai had ample amounts of both. Thanks to people like him, today India has a stature of its own among the nations of the world. There have been others too, who have given the country as much, Narayana Murthy being a top of the mind recall. And I feel naturally proud that I am born in the same land as such great men.

She is beautiful !

She has captured my heart. Her photo has been occupying my desktop for the past few days. I am longing to meet her again and hold her and kiss her.
She is my cousin's daughter, Dhriti. I haven't seen anything more tender than this.