Archive for May, 2007

A couple of items that caught my attention this week.

Dubbawallas of Mumbai. As the Indian economy grows at a dizzying pace, the subcontinent is experiencing rapid social change, but some traditions are standing the test of time. One of them is the dubbawallas — the men who deliver tiffins (those metal canisters) of home-cooked hot lunches to office workers all around Mumbai. Forget office cafeterias and fast-food chains. Workers in Mumbai still enjoy the warm lunches lovingly prepared by their wives, mothers, and grandmothers. The dubbawallas—whose business has been growing 5 to 10 percent annually—have an elaborate system of picking up tens of thousands of tiffins from homes each day, taking them to a central train station, sorting them by destination, and then getting them to the proper offices just in time for lunch. The entire process then works in reverse to get the empty tiffins back home. Rarely is a mistake ever made. As one dubbawalla says, “There is a service called FedEx that is similar to ours—but they don’t deliver lunch.”

Which companies are receiving H1-B visas? H1-B work visas were intended to help U.S. companies hire skilled workers from abroad when they can’t find Americans to fill job openings. Ironically, though, non-U.S. companies—namely Indian outsourcing firms—have been using the visas. Yes, that’s right. Outsourcing companies are staffing their U.S. offices with foreign workers on H1-B visas. BusinessWeek magazine recently compiled a list of the top 25 recipients of H1-B visas in the 2006 fiscal year. The Indian outsourcing firms Infosys and Wipro came in first and second, respectively. In all, 16 of the top 25, whether U.S. or non-U.S. companies, had significant outsourcing operations. For more details, check out the slide show of the list here.

Back in March, I wrote that the Web site SlideShare.net, which lets you share your PowerPoint presentations with the entire world, had launched the World’s Best Presentation Contest. Last week, the winners were announced, and it turns out that the two first-place winners (the judges’ top choice and the people’s top choice) both have India-related content.

Shift Happens. Did you know that the top 28 percent of the population in India with the highest IQs is greater than the entire population of North America? This slide show presents some startling statistics about our rapidly changing world. China and India are competing more strongly than ever with the United States. Technology is connecting us and transforming our society in ways never imagined. Change is part of the human condition, and this slide show reminds us that, well, shift happens.

PaniPuri. For those of you who love eating pani puri, this slide show will have your mouth watering. It celebrates all the virtues of this popular Indian food and concludes that it’s a “true World 2.0 Product.”

We’ve all heard about the uproar that American actor Richard Gere caused last month in India when he kissed Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty at an AIDS awareness event. I entirely agree that the Indians who were burning Gere in effigy were overreacting and that putting out a warrant for his arrest is ridiculous.

The whole incident is indicative of how India is undergoing its own sexual revolution right now, just as the United States did in the 1960s and 1970s. (Remember, there was once a time in the United States when TV shows depicted husband and wife sleeping in separate beds.) The norms of Indian society are rapidly changing, and Indians are divided between those who are moving with the times and those who hold steadfast to tradition. The Indians at the AIDS awareness event seemed to be laughing at the kissing episode. They didn’t seem to have a problem with it. On the other hand, the more conservative elements in society were infuriated. Gere had it right when he said on The Daily Show:

“There is a very small right-wing, very conservative political party in India and they are the moral police in India … they do this kind of thing quite often.”

And speaking of right-wing conservatives, when I saw the Gere-Shetty kissing incident, I couldn’t help thinking of the “massage” that U.S. President George W. Bush’s gave German Chancellor Angela Merkel last summer at the G8 conference. Just like Merkel, Shetty was taken by surprise—she had a startled expression on her face and she lost her balance. Perhaps the lesson to be learned is that boorish frat-boy antics, whether from Bush, Gere or any other man, don’t go over very well.