The Beautiful and the Damned

by Siddhartha Deb

  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.

  2

  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.

  Arvind was the owner of A Fuller Life or, in his own words, ‘the founder and CEO’. He was a short man with a firm handshake, a shaven head and snappy phrases (‘Warren Buffett is God’) that he threw out at me with a slight degree of impatience. A former engineer with a degree in business management, he had worked his way through a series of corporate jobs before beginning his company in 2001. It had started, he said, as a service for people who had just moved to Bangalore and wanted to take guitar or painting lessons. Arvind found them the classes they wanted and made his money by charging the instructors a commission. Two years later, he bagged his first corporate client, a software company that hired him for a ‘ninety-minute session on graphology that was attended by a hundred and fifty people’. From there, Arvind’s company had expanded into providing services for companies at four kinds of ‘sites’: ‘external’, or outside the office, with the activities mostly involving sports; at office cafeterias, where they held competitions ‘usually involving song or dance’; on the workfloor, where people were given puzzles to do; and on the computer itself, in the form of quizzes and games.

  ‘It sounds like an extension of college,’ I said.

  ‘It is,’ Arvind said tetchily, ‘and that’s a very good thing. Many of these people are straight out of college.’

  We were sitting near the kitchen and had to move aside briefly when two young men showed up from an external site to stack the cricket gear they had just used, grunting with effort as they lifted each bag. Chatura Padaki, one of Arvind’s employees, had joined us. She was a soft-spoken woman who had worked with Arvind before at a dot.com. Unlike Arvind, whose focus was always on the peaks achieved by his company (it had a ‘market capitalization’ of 5 crore rupees and intended to increase that to 100 crores in twenty years), Chatura was more reflective, less programmed to respond with packaged phrases. Where Arvind had skimmed impatiently past the details of his work life, Chatura talked about the fact that they had both been laid off by the dot.com where they had worked together. She was also more willing to let me see how A Fuller Life worked, suggesting that I accompany some of the employees on a client visit.

  ‘That won’t be possible,’ Arvind cut in quickly. ‘They’ve refused such requests in the past, and by the way, don’t name any names in your piece.’

  It was in the same reflective vein that Chatura talked about why their clients needed the services they provided. ‘These companies hire thousands of people from different parts of India, youngsters who are new to the city and whose work day runs from eight thirty in the morning to eight thirty in the evening. They eat most of their meals at work, they spend much of their time a
t their workplace, and they depend completely on their company for recreation possibilities. These people can’t explore Bangalore even if they want to, because the companies have set up their offices on the fringes of the city.’

  ‘It’s a sticky workplace model,’ Arvind said. ‘It’s more efficient for the companies to retain their workforce by providing engagement.’

  Chatura brought me two pieces of paper to give me an idea of the activities they used to get people involved. The first was a crossword puzzle with the heading ‘Health’; it was something employees would find on their desks when they came into work. The other was a handout showing a man doing the ‘Japanese sport Nanjatsu [sic]’, which would be distributed by workers from A Fuller Life.

  ‘They’ll go on to the office floor with the company’s HR people and say, “Stop everything you’re doing for ten minutes,” ’ Chatura said. ‘Then one of our employees will show everyone how to do the exercises.’

  ‘These are meant for different kinds of workers,’ Arvind said. ‘The Nanjatsu one would be right for the call centre crowd, but not for IT workers. The crossword puzzle is the one meant for IT workers.’

  I asked him to explain the difference between call centre workers and IT workers.

  ‘The call centre people display a tighter distribution in terms of age,’ Arvind said. ‘The IT people reveal a tighter distribution in terms of homogeneity.’

  He meant that the call centre workers were all young, recent college graduates in their twenties. The IT workers were more likely to have engineering degrees, come from similar middle-class backgrounds, be older than the call centre workers and therefore less receptive to things like ninjutsu. But it would also be wasteful, Arvind said, for a company to use up the work hours of engineers with activities like ‘Nanjatsu’, because they brought in more money per hour than the call centre crowd. The higher qualifications and greater productivity of engineers meant that their lives were less full even when it came to play.

  3

  It was Chak who gave me a sense of what an engineer’s life might look like from the inside, even if he was in most ways far removed from the people staring at quizzes sent to their computers. He was in his fifties, with a senior position at a well-known American semiconductor company that he asked me not to identify. It was with the same candour that he asked me to call him Chak rather than Chakravarthy Prasad, which was his actual name. With his curly, dishevelled hair, greying moustache and rimless glasses, Chak had an almost professorial air about him. The rest of him, however, consisted of a corporate man in a hurry, from the BlackBerry winking against his small paunch to the giant Ford SUV in which he came bursting out of his office complex when I first went to meet him.

  I was late for that meeting, the result of finding an auto-rickshaw driver enthusiastic about the fare but ill-informed about the corporate topography of Bangalore. We had been driving for an hour through the fringes of the city, past farming plots and wetlands that were periodically broken up by a sudden eruption of office towers. Finally, I reached the company where Chak worked, one of a string of outsourcing and software complexes situated along the Outer Ring Road, their cool, gleaming exteriors shimmering like mirages amid the rubble and scrubland of an area where city and village met in an uneasy convergence.

  I called Chak from the gates of his office and he came out to meet me. He drove us a few hundred yards down to an adjoining business complex, parking in front of the Accenture building. Two uniformed attendants approached Chak as he climbed out.

  ‘Sir, do you work for Accenture?’ one man asked.

  ‘No,’ Chak said brusquely.

  ‘Sir, parking only for company people.’

  ‘It doesn’t say that anywhere,’ Chak said. ‘This must be visitor parking.’ He walked off, gesturing at me to follow.

  The attendants gaped at us as we crossed over to the food court on the other side. We walked past lone, overweight managers in company polo shirts crouched over late lunches of rice and dal.

  ‘The first thing they say in India is “No”,’ Chak said as we entered a Café Coffee Day. ‘It’s a reflex position, and so you learn to throw your weight around.’

  Chak had come to this understanding of India gradually, over decades of living in India and in the United States. He had grown up in a middle-class Tamil Brahmin family in Madras (now called Chennai), very focused on his education.

  ‘India is a highly tiered society,’ he said, ‘where you go the range from the labourer to the CEO. Education is an important vehicle of mobility in such a system, and that is what explains the appeal of engineering in India.’ He looked at me and added politely, ‘And writing too.’

  Chak, in spite of being a good student, had at first been unable to move up the tiered system. He’d failed to gain admission to an engineering college and had settled for studying mathematics at a local college. After finishing college, however, he entered the graduate programme in mathematics at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science in Pilani, Rajasthan. It was one of India’s top engineering institutions, and after two years there, Chak switched from mathematics to computer science.

  It was at this point that Chakravarthy Prasad began becoming Chak, and the machines he worked with played a significant role in the transformation. At Pilani, Chak and all the other students used an IBM 1130 mainframe computer.

  ‘It had a typewriter keyboard, a kiosk, and punch cards on which we wrote the programs,’ Chak said, describing the computer rapidly and efficiently. ‘There was always a long queue for the programs created by different people – they were written on punch cards in those days – and we gave our punch cards to the attendant and came back later for the printouts with the results.’

  In 1983, he completed his degree and returned to Madras, joining a small company run by another BITS Pilani graduate. There, Chak worked with an Osborne PC.

  ‘It had a green LCD display,’ he said. ‘Looked something like a present-day logic analyser. Eight-inch monitor. Floppy drive. We did a project for Fairchild Semiconductors, working on a simulator for a 64-bit processor. We did another project for IBM on their PC. In 1984, we bought our first Mac, which was a class act even at that time.’

  After a couple of years, though, the projects dried up, and in 1986, Chak left for America. He travelled to Rockford, Illinois, where he lived in an apartment building that housed seven other Indians, all of them working for the Barber-Colman company. Rockford is the third-largest city in Illinois, a slice of Middle America whose prosperity was built on factories making industrial machinery and furniture. But, like other manufacturing centres in America, Rockford eventually saw many of its factories close down, their production moved to countries like Mexico and China where workers could be paid less. By the time Chak arrived in Rockford, it had already entered a trajectory of decline.

  Chak didn’t know that Rockford had declined. To him, it was a ‘picture perfect’ place, although it was also ‘middle of nowhere’, ‘bitterly cold’ and ‘a small town’. Above all, it was a place where he had to learn to negotiate America and understand that it was ‘a low-context society’.

  ‘India is a high-context society,’ he explained. ‘It is a place where people interact with each other in many different ways. But in America, people work on the basis of interest groups. People are together for a reason, like work, and the interaction focuses on the reason for being together. It doesn’t get deeper than that. So, for example, we used a maid service in the US, but we learned that it’s not like in India where the maid would expect my wife and me to sit and chat with her. The American maid would think me transparent if I did that. But I also felt uncomfortable having another person in the house without interacting with her, so eventually I learned to put my Walkman on when she came in to clean.’

  In the beginning, Chak had found all this difficult. ‘Every Indian wants to return in the first year or two,’ he said, ‘but it doesn’t work out that way.’ Eventually, when he began coming back to India on
business trips, he found that its high-context nature bothered him. He felt awkward about the sheer number of people paying attention to him at hotels and restaurants when he wanted nothing more than to be left alone. At some point, however, Chak began to sense a change in India. He decided to return, hoping to contribute to the change because he’d ‘been there’, at the heart of the low-context society that was leading the world.

  Even within the realm of technology, though, he found cultural differences. In India, people were quick to take on engineering careers because it was a way of moving up a highly tiered society, but they began to stagnate after ten years. They were also more likely to have ‘irrational expectations’ at the beginning of their careers. ‘They’re knowledge workers, but they don’t have it right,’ Chak said. ‘Engin-eers here want more money, more money, more money. Everybody wants more.’

  Chak’s world could seem utterly self-contained, and nowhere more so than in the physical environment he functioned in. The company where he worked stood behind high walls and a guard booth, encased in silence and reserve, its bright blue logo when seen from the road suggesting some imperial palace glimpsed by a lone traveller. This feeling was enhanced by the court protocol of going inside to meet Chak, as I did a few days after our first encounter.

  I stopped at the security booth, complying with the tiresome requirement of filling out name, address and contact numbers in a register. The guard called Chak to confirm that I was expected, then handed me a visitor’s pass. ‘Follow the yellow line,’ he said, and so I did, obeying its zigs and zags past an empty tennis court and a crowded parking lot. Outside the complex, a dust storm billowed on the horizon, blocking out a yellow construction crane poised over a half-built tower. As I reached the main building, low and wide, the rain began falling, thick drops that splattered on the dust and sent up the sweet, heady smell of wet dirt.