The Beautiful and the Damned (12 page)

Not too long after starting my new job, I entered the house one day to find my boss doing push-ups on the floor. He had taken his tie off and rolled up his sleeves, and as he dipped and rose on the concrete floor, the employees stood around in a circle, counting off loudly. I had come in late, and he finished soon after I entered, sweating slightly from the Calcutta humidity and the exertion of a hundred push-ups, but otherwise none the worse for wear. As he buttoned and knotted himself back to his usual suave state, he challenged those gathered around to do better than him. He was rewarded with embarrassed laughter, which is probably what he wanted. The people in the room were computer instructors, shallow-chested geeks who couldn’t have bettered his effort and would never have dreamed of competing with the man who employed them. They were grateful for their jobs, which involved giving lessons in data entry and computer programming to young people who weren’t very well educated and didn’t have much money. When the instructors weren’t in the classroom, they were usually brandishing thick manuals at each other, muttering arcane phrases like ‘Foxpro’ and ‘C++’ that signalled their involvement with a mysterious, incomprehensible world.

Because the company still exists, its advertisements prominently visible in Calcutta, I am not going to name it or the man who owned it. But even with a fictitious name, I can picture Indranil very clearly, a well-built, light-skinned megalomaniac who combined business management flair with a hustling instinct. He had worked as a marketing man for a large multinational, and you could see the corporate touch in the ties he wore and the crisp English he spoke on the phone. But he also had the street-smart ways of a neighbourhood tough, and this had helped him muscle his way into the computer education business.

This was the early nineties, still some way from India’s technology boom, but there were already dozens of private institutes offering computer courses for people who had failed to get into engineering colleges. Indranil had carved out his niche in this competitive business by targeting people who couldn’t afford the fees charged by other institutes. Like Arindam Chaudhuri, he too was cashing in on aspiration, but unlike the guru with a ponytail, he had to make his
courses really affordable. This might have been one of the reasons why Indranil’s computer centres always had an even more makeshift air than the IIPM campus, as if they were the outposts of some mildly disreputable business that could be dismantled at the slightest whiff of trouble.

The computer schools were located inside nondescript houses in mostly residential neighbourhoods. They had none of the neon lighting, soft carpeting and attractive female receptionists to be seen in the upscale institutes around Park Street, but that did not bother the young people who showed up for the computer classes. Their shabby clothes crumpled from long rides in crowded buses and trains, the heels of their slippers worn unevenly from pounding the city streets, they would have been ill at ease at the more expensive institutes. Many of them lived in the run-down suburban settlements scattered around Calcutta, or in the polluted township of Howrah, just across the Hooghly river from Calcutta, and it was apparent that they struggled to put together even the fairly modest fees charged by Indranil. Yet they had received just enough education to make them unfit for work as maidservants or bus conductors. In a few years’ time, they might well descend to that level, but as they wandered around clutching notebooks and photocopied sections of computer manuals, they were still aspirers, dreaming of office jobs that would give them a semblance of middle-class life.

The instructors hired by Indranil weren’t that much more secure, although perhaps a notch or two above the students on the class ladder. They were people whose certificates from the more reputable computer institutes had cost them a lot of money, and they were now trying desperately to earn back that money. Since there weren’t too many jobs as yet for people with computer skills, many of these graduates inevitably found themselves regurgitating their knowledge back to others, often for very long hours and rather poor pay.

The combination of underprivileged students and insecure instructors meant that although Indranil had a flourishing business, few of his students found work after finishing their courses, which is where I came into the picture. Indranil had decided, in one of the sudden insights he was prone to, that the students performed badly at
job interviews because they couldn’t speak English. Their computer skills were sound, he said when I first met him. The problem was, metaphorically speaking, that they hadn’t learned to zip up their trousers after taking a piss. I had been hired to redress this problem by creating a ‘module’ that would teach the students ‘spoken English’.

I didn’t know what a module was or how one might teach people to zip up their trousers. But I needed money and the 2,000 rupees Indranil paid me every month seemed like a lot, even if the ‘part-time’ position he had spoken of when offering me the job evolved into sitting around waiting for him from eight in the morning till eight at night, writing the occasional advertising copy for his company, and putting up with odd rituals like Indranil’s practice of having lunch in the staff office with the female instructors while all the male employees wandered around the streets like disbanded soldiers.

It was in the course of all this that I got my first exposure to computers. Although Indranil himself didn’t know how to use one, he had asked an instructor to give me lessons to make me a better fit with the culture of his company. One afternoon, a chubby-faced instructor took me into an empty classroom, his usual smile giving way to suitable gravitas as he scribbled:

I wrote this down dutifully, but when he began drawing a computer on the blackboard, I suggested that it might be more useful to go and look at an actual computer. ‘What if you press the wrong button?’ he said, and between his refusal to diminish the mystery of computers and my reluctance to play along, the lesson came to a swift end. Instead, I borrowed a
DOS for Dummies
(‘1,024 bytes = 1 kilobyte’) from another instructor and began trying my luck on the machines in the computer lab. Eventually, I abandoned DOS machines altogether and started dabbling on a black-and-white 386 that ran Windows, where I spent most of my time drawing grinning skulls that created some perplexity among students and instructors engaged in more worthwhile tasks.

It occurred to me that I was behaving badly, but I didn’t know what else to do. There was little I could talk about with my faux-engineer colleagues. They were decent people, generous to help when I crashed the computer, hard-working and deferential towards authority, intelligent and socially awkward. I found them a little sad, with their twelve-hour shifts and their submissiveness towards Indranil. I have no doubt they found me sadder still, especially when I left the company after a couple of months.

Their time would come soon enough, though, when the West got caught up in a growing panic about the Y2K bug, which was expected to create mayhem when the new millennium began. The panic created jobs for people with computer skills and, from the mid-nineties onwards, the United States began issuing tens of thousands of H1B visas to Indian engineers, even as American companies started setting up offices in India where people worked late into the night to stay in sync with US time. The Y2K bug failed to have any discernible effect, but it was followed by a dot.com boom that also required people with computer skills. When that petered out, there came the back office jobs being ‘Bangalored’, or outsourced, to India.

These phases had transformed the sort of people I worked with at Indranil’s company, turning them into the globally recognizable figure of the Indian engineer, a mobile professional who is at home in cubicles everywhere, from the back offices of India to the body shops in the West. The instructors I had known were insecure figures, anxious to hold on to their jobs and in awe of Indranil; even though he had no knowledge of computers, he was the boss running the show. In the years since then, engineers have become bosses. They have become a new breed of capitalists, creating ventures like Hotmail (which Sabeer Bhatia sold off to Microsoft in 1997 for $400 million), or building vast Indian companies like Infosys (one of whose founders, Nandan Nilekani, was elevated into sainthood by Thomas Friedman in
The World Is Flat
) and Satyam (whose founder, Ramalinga Raju, created a huge empire of software, construction and real estate in Hyderabad). These companies were so successful that by 2006, the information technology sector
in India was earning about $25 billion annually, much of that from exports.

In the West, in spite of provoking the occasional backlash from people unhappy about their jobs being outsourced, Indian engineers are perceived as model minority citizens. Clustered into the suburban ghettos of places like Edison, New Jersey, and invisible for the most part in the social landscape, they are considered safe people, productive at work, conservative in values and unlikely ever to raise difficult questions about race or inequality.

But if they are invisible in the West outside the office, Indian engineers have become particularly prominent at home, especially those who began returning from the West during the boom years of outsourcing. As they recolonized sections of their own nation in the image of the suburban West they had experienced, they became oracles of the future: ‘Honey, the world is flat.’

Success, or even the appearance of success, is a hard thing, especially in a country so populous and so unequal as India. For the engineer, it has meant being elevated to the role of world-builder, capable of solving all the problems of the country from poverty, caste and illiteracy to sloth and corruption, even if the ways in which the engineer will solve these problems remains unclear.

Most of the engineers I know are very likeable people, but what I know of them as individuals clashes with what I see of them in the aggregate. The engineer celebrated for being clean-cut and decent in public, especially in the West, is often also the one lurking on websites, filling cyberspace with a viral chatter that is sectarian, sexist and racist, convinced always of his own meritoriousness and ready to pour invective on those who disagree with him. If there is a schizoid personality at work here, that seems to be furthered by the fact that the engineer is both a public persona and a rather enigmatic figure. There are few books or films, even in India, that have successfully depicted what it might be like to live the life of an engineer, to be a person whose experience ranges from the productive, efficient work carried out in cubicles to the hate speech left, like scent marks on a lamppost, on the comments section of news-sites like
Rediff.com
(India). Years after my stint at Indranil’s company, I wondered what
people working in information technology were really like. While most of the current rhetoric about the engineer was about how skilfully he worked with computers, prized for being a sort of computer producing efficiency and profit, I wanted to find out more about the inner life of the engineer. I wanted to know if there was a ghost in the machine.

I had felt the dissonance of the place from the moment I arrived. The airport at Bangalore was new, its floors and conveyor belts gleaming brightly, its uniformed staff politely attentive. The turquoise-green taxi I took from the airport was air-conditioned and comfortable, and the fare was six times the amount charged by the battered cabs of Delhi and Calcutta. Then I got to Benson Town, the neighbourhood where I was staying, and I began to see landmarks of the colonial city built by the British as a cantonment area around and over an older Indian settlement. A short walk from the apartment was the Masjid-e-Khadria, glimmering white and gold in the night; across from it stood the Bishop’s House, its grey stone walls laced with ivy; a little further down, there was the Jayamahal Palace, a folly of an English mansion whose grounds were disproportionately large for the building and which functioned these days as a heritage hotel.

When morning came, these sights were hidden by streams of traffic. They meant nothing, anyway, to the young professionals arriving every day in Bangalore from the far-flung corners of India. Even the people I was staying with were outsiders, although they were journalists and not engineers. Samrat, whose flat it was, came from Shillong, while his room-mate, Akshay, was a photographer from Bombay. When the three of us talked in the evening, closing the windows of the living room so that we could hear each other above the sound of the cars, it seemed as if we were shutting out not just the traffic but Bangalore itself. There might be professional opportunity in Bangalore, created by the technology hubs, and there might be an older city, genteel and spacious, but the two did not come together as a unified experience.

If this posed a problem for Samrat and Akshay, sociable individuals whose work depended on interacting with other people, it created a far more difficult situation for the tens of thousands of people who had been recruited off college campuses or from other companies to work in the cubicles of Bangalore’s technology concerns. They were far from their homes, disliked so much by the local people for driving up prices, crowding the city and supposedly bringing in a rootless, Westernized lifestyle that a few months earlier
Outlook
magazine had carried a cover story called ‘Why Bangalore Hates the IT Culture’. And yet, in some ways, the IT culture was as much about loneliness and a sense of displacement as it was about high salaries and a consumer lifestyle. The engineers arriving in Bangalore were dedicated to the virtues of work, productivity and upward mobility, but even engineers cannot fill up their lives with just these things, which is why technocratic Bangalore had come up with a technocratic solution – a company that supplied happiness.

The offices of A Fuller Life were in the neighbourhood of Austin Town, the location evoking the uneasy juxtaposition of old and new that is so characteristic of contemporary Bangalore. The directions I had been given on the phone involved getting off near the Lifestyle Mall, where Western men in khakis accompanied their Indian co-workers on a hesitant sampling of the food court version of native cuisine. The office itself was inside a residential neighbourhood near the mall, approached through twisting alleyways where people lingered in front of small storefronts, while above them, on rooftops crammed closely together, housewives vigorously shook out their washing before hanging the clothes up to dry. It was a setting that made the idea of supplying happiness seem absurd, but there was money to be made from such absurdity, as Arvind Krishnan made clear.