Start communicating
Bangalorians
Recent Village Updates
Login to find out
has added a new journalSource: www.nytimes.com
M.B.A. Students Bypassing Wall Street for a Summer in
India
By SARITHA RAI
BANGALORE, India, Aug. 9 - This summer, Omar Maldonado
and Erik Simonsen, both students at the Leonard N.
Stern School of Business at New York University, did
something different.
Bypassing internship opportunities on Wall Street,
just a subway ride away from their Greenwich Village
campus, they went to India to spend the summer at an
outsourcing company in Gurgaon, a suburb of New Delhi.
"The India opportunity grabbed me," said Mr.
Maldonado, a Boston native whose family is from the
Dominican Republic. "I wanted to get a global feel for
investment banking and not just a Wall Street
perspective."
He and Mr. Simonsen, both 27, are spending three
months at Copal Partners, an outsourcing firm with 100
analysts. It produces merger and acquisition pitch
books and provides equity and credit analysis and
other research to global banks and consultant groups,
including those on Wall Street.
Mr. Maldonado and Mr. Simonsen, of Riverside, Calif.,
are part of a virtual invasion of India by American
students. Graduate students from top schools in the
United States, most from master of business
administration programs, are vying for internships at
India's biggest private companies. For many,
outsourcing companies are the destinations of choice.
India is not just a line on an American student's
r?sum?, said Kiran Karnik, president of the
outsourcing industry trade body, Nasscom, "but also
culturally fulfilling." Many students travel while in
India, giving them a view of the country and its long
history, he said.
Nasscom is now trying to track the ever-increasing
numbers of foreign interns. Many are in India to study
globalization firsthand, Mr. Karnik said; that is
often not possible in China because, unlike India,
English is not widely spoken there.
Mr. Karnik said he had met more than a dozen interns
from the Harvard Business School who were spending
this summer in India. "I expect a bigger horde of
students to arrive next year because the ones here
said they had a great time and will go home to talk
about it," he said.
Elsewhere, too, the trend is on the rise. Four
students from Fuqua School of Business at Duke
University are interning in India, compared with only
one last year and none in 2003. Of this year's
interns, three are at Infosys Technologies, an
outsourcing company in Bangalore, and the fourth is in
Chennai at GlobalGiving, an organization based in
Bethesda, Md., that helps support social, economic and
environmental projects around the world.
At Georgetown University, Stanley D. Nollen, a
professor of international business at the Robert
Emmett McDonough School of Business, said India was of
growing interest to students.
"No longer is India thought of as a land of snake
charmers and bride burnings," he said. "Now India
means the world's best software services, and
increasingly, pharmaceuticals and auto parts."
Professor Nollen directs the school's programs for
M.B.A. students in India, which include "residencies"
- academic courses that are centered on consulting
projects for companies operating in India. A group of
49 students arrived this month and went to companies
like Philips India Software and MindTree Consulting,
both in Bangalore; the motorcycle-making unit of
Eicher in Chennai; and the ICICI Bank in Mumbai.
India can be a jolt to a first-time American visitor.
In Gurgaon, a small town despite its tall office
complexes and shiny new malls, Mr. Maldonado and Mr.
Simonsen share an apartment where the power fails
several times a day. Temperatures are regularly above
100 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer.
The two men said they came prepared to find inadequate
infrastructure, but were not prepared for the daily
frustrations of Gurgaon. There is no mass
transportation system, and shopping, even for
something as basic as an umbrella, can take hours.
They rumble to work in an auto rickshaw - a motorized
three-wheeler that seats two and is a ubiquitous form
of transport in Indian cities.
But the sophistication of the work being done in
Copal's Gurgaon office contrasts with the chaotic city
outside. Mr. Simonsen said he was amazed. "I came
expecting to see number-crunching and spreadsheet type
of work; I didn't expect American banks to farm out
intricate analytics," he said. The two students are
working on a project that analyzes investment
opportunities for clients across 23 countries.
Infosys Technologies, the country's second-largest
outsourcing firm after Tata Consultancy Services,
discovered how popular India had become as an
internship destination for Americans when the company
began recruiting: for the 40 intern spots at its
Bangalore headquarters, the company received 9,000
applications. Only those with a cumulative grade-point
average of 3.6 or more made it to a short list, and
then they were put through two rounds of interviews.
The final 40, who cut a wide academic swathe from
engineering schools like M.I.T. and Carnegie Mellon to
business schools like Stanford, Wharton and Kellogg,
have since arrived on campus for average stays of
three months. The interns work in areas from marketing
to technology. They live in a 500-room hotel complex
on Infosys's expansive campus in the suburbs of
Bangalore, exchanging coupons for meals at the food
court and riding the company bus downtown to
decompress at the many pubs and bars.
Among the Infosys interns is Caton Burwell, 28, from
the Stanford Graduate School of Business. "India has
come to symbolize globalization and I wanted to
participate in the workings of the global economy," he
said. "Besides, it would look great on my r?sum?."
Mr. Burwell said that, since arriving in India, he had
developed a better grasp of the workings of the global
economy and the logic behind the choices companies and
countries make. "Being here is a powerful experience;
it is impossible not to think differently," he said.
Also, his attitude toward outsourcing has changed
since meeting Indian employees, who he said work very
hard and care a great deal about the quality of their
work. "To come here, meet these people, and to return
home and turn your back on outsourcing is hard," he
said.
Jeffrey Anders, 29, from the Sloan School of
Management at M.I.T., is similarly stirred. Mr. Anders
is halfway through his internship at the business
process outsourcing division of Hewlett-Packard India
in Bangalore.
"I can't help but feel that I am witnessing the
creation of a new global economic order, a new reality
that most people back home don't realize is coming,"
said Mr. Anders.
After a meeting with the recruiting head of
Hewlett-Packard India's back-office unit at a
conference at M.I.T., Mr. Anders came to India to help
build a group of Indian economists and statisticians
to perform complex analytics and predictive modeling
for Western multinationals. "These highly educated and
qualified people are not stopping at call centers and
back-office work," he said. "They are getting ready to
compete for every job."
Meanwhile, Indian companies are looking at summer
internships as a way of building a diverse work
culture.
"Bringing investment bankers here provides our Indian
team a perspective and context of Wall Street," said
Joel Perlman, co-founder of Copal Partners, a company
based in London that has four employees each in New
York and London and another 100 or so in India.
Other companies, and even the schools themselves, are
looking at internships as a step toward attracting
bright young Americans to work in India. Infosys, for
instance, hired Joshua Bornstein, a former intern from
Claremont McKenna College in California, nearly two
years ago as its first American employee based in
India.
"In this increasingly global economy, we would expect
to see India become an even greater source of
employment for our students," Sheryle Dirks, director
of the Career Management Center at Fuqua, said.
Mr. Anders, from the Sloan school, works in a new
Hewlett-Packard building, where he sometimes works out
at the gym in the basement and eats at the cafeteria
on the terrace. The employees work in open cubicles,
similar to those in offices anywhere in the West. His
team consists of four Indians, all with M.B.A.'s like
him, and they operate globally, collaborating with
teams in California and elsewhere.
Interns like Mr. Anders are getting a close view of
social changes that are happening in India.
Outsourcing has created thousands of better-paying
jobs and spawned communities of young people who can
afford cars, apartments and iPods.
"I thought the stipend was the down side," said Mr.
Anders, "but coming here is a priceless experience."
Login to find out
has added a new journalA BRAIN TRUST IN BANGALORE
Sarnoff and other big tech names are setting up research
operations in India -- and not just because of the cheap labor:
tinyurl.com
Login to find out
has added a new journalNYTimes
June 3, 2005
A Race to the Top
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Bangalore, India
It was extremely revealing traveling from Europe to India as French voters (and now Dutch ones) were rejecting the E.U. constitution - in one giant snub to President Jacques Chirac, European integration, immigration, Turkish membership in the E.U. and all the forces of globalization eating away at Europe's welfare states. It is interesting because French voters are trying to preserve a 35-hour work week in a world where Indian engineers are ready to work a 35-hour day. Good luck.
Voters in "old Europe" - France, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy - seem to be saying to their leaders: stop the world, we want to get off; while voters in India have been telling their leaders: stop the world and build us a stepstool, we want to get on. I feel sorry for Western European blue collar workers. A world of benefits they have known for 50 years is coming apart, and their governments don't seem to have a strategy for coping.
One reason French voters turned down the E.U. constitution was rampant fears of "Polish plumbers." Rumors that low-cost immigrant plumbers from Poland were taking over the French plumbing trade became a rallying symbol for anti-E.U. constitution forces. A few weeks ago Franz M?ntefering, chairman of Germany's Social Democratic Party, compared private equity firms - which buy up failing businesses, downsize them and then sell them - to a "swarm of locusts."
The fact that a top German politician has resorted to attacking capitalism to win votes tells you just how explosive the next decade in Western Europe could be, as some of these aging, inflexible economies - which have grown used to six-week vacations and unemployment insurance that is almost as good as having a job - become more intimately integrated with Eastern Europe, India and China in a flattening world.
To appreciate just how explosive, come to Bangalore, India, the outsourcing capital of the world. The dirty little secret is that India is taking work from Europe or America not simply because of low wages. It is also because Indians are ready to work harder and can do anything from answering your phone to designing your next airplane or car. They are not racing us to the bottom. They are racing us to the top.
Indeed, there is a huge famine breaking out all over India today, an incredible hunger. But it is not for food. It is a hunger for opportunity that has been pent up like volcanic lava under four decades of socialism, and it's now just bursting out with India's young generation.
"India is the oldest civilization, the largest democracy and the youngest population - almost 70 percent is below age 35 and almost 50 percent is 25 and under," said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express. Next to India, Western Europe looks like an assisted-living facility with Turkish nurses.
Sure, a huge portion of India still lives in wretched slums or villages, but more and more of the young cohort are grasping for something better. A grass-roots movement is now spreading, demanding that English be taught in state schools - where 85 percent of children go - beginning in first grade, not fourth grade. "What's new is where this movement is coming from," said the Indian commentator Krishna Prasad. "It's coming from the farmers and the Dalits, the lowest groups in society." Even the poor have been to the cities enough to know that English is now the key to a tech-sector job, and they want their kids to have those opportunities.
The Indian state of West Bengal has the oldest elected Communist government left in the world today. Some global technology firms recently were looking at outsourcing there, but told the Communists they could not do so because of the possibility of worker strikes that might disrupt the business processes of the companies they work for. No problem. The Communist government declared information technology work an "essential service," making it illegal for those workers to strike. Have a nice day.
"This is not about wages at all - the whole wage differential thing is going to reduce very quickly," said Rajesh Rao, who heads the innovative Indian game company, Dhruva. It is about people who have been starving "finally seeing the ability to realize their dreams." Both Infosys and Wipro, India's leading technology firms, received more than one million applications last year for a little more than 10,000 job openings.
Yes, this is a bad time for France and friends to lose their appetite for hard work - just when India, China and Poland are rediscovering theirs.
