Monday, March 12, 2007

Fair Unfair

There are words and terms we come across almost every day and sometimes a number of times but we fail to pause and ponder over them.We just read over them without giving much of a thought,dont we ?
One such word is outsourcing.
I was recently watching a documentary on outsourcing made by an american whose job had been bangalored(its a legitimate word now,i guess).This man, in the profession of a software engineer for the past 4-5 years reaches his office on a normal day to find a pink slip on his desk.On probing matters he got to know from his boss that his job had been outsourced to TCS to an indian guy who now manages to manage his profile in one-third of the salary he used to draw.
Shell-shocked, he returns home to break the news to his family(a girlfriend and a 2-3 month old son) and then visits his parents in the evening to discuss his sudden state of unemployment over dinner. Three mouths to feed and not wanting to depend on social security he decides to probe matters further..He plans a visit to the hub of outsourced jobs-Bangalore.
To his amazement,on the drive from airport to the address of the middle class south indian family he had to stay with,he found an office of almost every big american firm he could think of.The two working people in the family,brothers, were also employed in the IT sector,elder one as a team leader in a BPO and other as a software engineer and the fact certainly did not help assuage his state of distress.Implicitly or explicitly they had snatched away two jobs from the US.
In an attempt to regain his lost confidence he walked into a 'walk in with ur resume and walk out with a job' type of a recruitment consultant and to his utter astonishment walked out with a job similar in profile to the one he had lost in his country.The recent series of jolts he had received never seemed to get over when he was asked to attend an american accent learning training session.The irony of the whole thing was the instructor was himself an Indian.