Trip to India - Entry 23 - Bangalore reflections

Tonight, I met my colleague from Amazon here in Bangalore, Sangeetha. For the first time since I have been here, I paid a fair price for the items I wanted to buy. Juliet, my roommate also came with us. We went out for some dinner, and by the time we were ready to order, the smells of the Indian food at the table next to me had turned my stomach to the extent that I ordered a mushroom pizza.

When Sangeetha and Juliet got their dosa (a large fried crispy crepe style bread, stuffed in this case with potatoes and onions), Sangeetha gave me a small bite, saying that it wasn't at all spicy. It was SPICY. I think that Indians don't have a functional spice-o-meter, and everything that is made in India seriously has such a huge pile of spices that even smelling the food caused my poor stomach to start jumping from fear that I would eat anything.

I feel like, on this penultimate full day in India, that I have not only learned a lot about India on this trip, but also about myself and my preconceptions of outsourcing. Everyone I've met here has been optimistic, hopeful about the future, hardworking - some to a fault. If I were to use only two words to describe Indians, I would use hard-working and optimistic. From the slum SGH women, to the Christ U MBA students, to the workers at Hero Honda, the young man at Expeditor's with the two hours each way commute, and the managers at Hewitt - Indians seem to have no problem with working hard, and what's more - they seem to have a hunger for the future.

I honestly don't think many Americans do. I think Americans realize quite well that for the average American, this current generation will not be as well off as the previous one, and that continued upward mobility - the American Dream - which was always rather a pipe dream, is even more out of the reach of ordinary Americans than it was before. I remember teaching undergraduate history courses at the UofO, how many of my students had been out partying most of the week and weren't prepared, and how the Christ U MBA students put in hours of preparatory work and competed for the opportunity to have a joint class with us. Indians want it more. So I don't feel like many Americans can honestly complain, when I don't think that as many Americans have put in the kind of effort I am seeing people putting in here.

I think I am also beginning to understand how to approach certain issues with training and culture that I otherwise wouldn't have known how to address. I will certainly be able to address them with more knowledge and cultural sensitivity. I still think that Indian IT workers are replaceable, if someone more shiny and interesting and cheaper comes along, like the cheap bangle bracelets we bought. All that's important is that it is a circular bracelet and it's shiny and cheap; the quality of construction is irrelevant, and I have no concerns over the welfare of those producing it. So one thing I do think is that while India is seeing the benefits of global outsourcing now, I feel like they'll be in our position in a decade or two (or less, in certain fields which are already being outsourced to the Philippines instead), and lamenting the loss of those jobs.

The most interesting and valuable insight this trip has given me is that economic prosperity almost forces gender equality. Many of our speakers were women in significant posts in the organization, and women are dominant in call center work. The women in the slums gained greater value in their homes because of the value of the micro-lending program in their daily life. When the women are empowered, child birth rates go down, education and health spending goes up, and society in general benefits. I read an article that in rural India, only 12-18 months after seeing shows where women had greater equality and value in the household, women in rural India were demanding the same for themselves. Certainly there have been losers in the recession and during globalization in recent years - but I would venture to say that the biggest winners in the past two decades of globalization since the fall of communism and end of the Cold War are women, especially poor women who basically started at the very bottom. And I don't see that as a bad thing at all.