Of Comparisons and Bad

A few 'bad' lessons learnt from my trip to Australia, I don't claim to be a know it all, and many may not agree with what I say, but this was very plain when I saw it:


We're not as well known as we think we are. When I was in my internship, I was actually asked by someone if I had learnt English only after I had arrived or if I knew it before. Even assuming that this person knew nothing about the outside world, it's enough to make any educated Indian gasp. This is the level of awareness about India.

Majority of the people (at least the lesser travelled ones) consider India to be an impvoerished country full of famine and hunger. And we are people belonging to that impoverished country.

One of the main reasons we're hired from India is not because we're smart, but because we are smart AND cheap. Indian people can be supported on up to one - tenth the wages of a person with a similar skill set in the western world. Plus, we have a different work ethic, to slog and slog, and that is why a company would want to hire Indians. And that is why many software companies are succeeding in a way. In a sense, we are slaves to the western economy working as cheap labour. And Indian companies are more than happy to use this formula.

We're not bold enough to assert ourselves. We don't talk back or fight back.

Most of the Indians who had newly arrived, had a poor set of soft skills, its not that I am a smooth talker and a perfect example for all, but it was very evident. One could of course easily argue that small talk in India is different from small talk in the west. Even then, we don't have tact in approaching people, or tact in giving a presentation (exceptions to this rule are there among my own friends) or tact in what topics to speak when. We've got to learn that talking loud in a restaurant is rude!

We give too much correllation between age and seniority, which is stupid. The better correllation would be between merit/skills and seniority. Thats why in a sense, the office environment outside India is different.

We have a long way to go in terms of infrastructure. Our roads are horrible, our airports are too slow, our banks require kilometers of red tape to be cut, our people don't have civic discipline (myself included), we don't have adequate support for people with disabilities and so on. Having said this, we're improving, but too slow, too slow.

We follow the herd, and keep thinking about doctors and engineers, not many people realize that some of the highest salaries for jobs in my college placements are given to people working in Mining and Metallurgy or Civil or Naval Architecture. Yet these branches are ranked really low, because they're not "the in thing". What good is an electrical or computer engineer without roads to travel to work or ships for goods transfer, metallurgy deals with nano materials promising to replace our current silicon technologies. Every field has a scope, from what I saw, it doesn't matter if you're a plumber or a district magistrate, two things are most important, first your character, second your skills. They decide your position, not your degrees.

We're horribly late for appointments as if is fashionable to do so, we don't plan our ways, we hustle and bustle and push for our means, rather than letting the pedestrian cross the road and slowing down a bit.

There are a lot of good things I learnt too, and I'll put them up in my next post!!! So don't kill me yet!


Berhael