Jai Ho!

This exultation goes out for Bihar - the state where I spent the first 18 years of my life.
If Jug is a Hon. Bong, then I should be a Hon. Bihari - even though the town I grew up in is now part of Jharkhand. And whenever other fellow Indians have engaged in Bihar bashing - though I kept away from joining in the derision, I could not do much in defense either.
Things appear to be changing though. For quite some time there have been reports of economic progress. Also - we haven't heard of any caste related violence in a long time. Kidnappings in Patna - so common a couple of years back - seems to have reduced. At a recent lecture in Patna , Amartya Sen gave his prescription for the roadmap to progress.
A couple of weeks back , a colleague narrated the good experience he had in doing business with the state government officials. He had gone to Patna to get an office property registered. It seems the whole thing got done in a day. The concerned IAS officer himself calls up the sub registrar office to speed things up. The babus at the registry office ensure that the task is done ASAP with no speed money being asked for. Apparently a similar task in neighbouring WB has taken more than a year to accomplish.

Outburst on Outsourced

I had never thought that I would be writing a movie review in this blog, but then 2 hours of Outsourced at a local multiplex did it. One can debate if - as Ad Guru and columnist Santosh Desai once put it - the movie was "fake genuine" or a "genuine fake". This movie , made in 2007 and for some unknown reason released in India in late 2008, is in my opinion the former. I am still OK with the NY Times giving this flawed and poorly researched story on India, outsourcing, BPO industry a rather favourable review, but what I find galling is that Indian movie reviewers like Nikhat Kazmi have given it a 3 star rating. The movie has managed to pile on us every possible cliche - the Indian viewer has to suffer along with the protagonist - crowded streets, manic auto-rickshaw drivers, cows and buffaloes blocking the roads, beggars, sadhus, dilapidated Ambassador cars, diarrhoea and thickly accented colleagues. Haven't we been through all these decades ago - a la Heat and Dust, Mind Your Language and god knows countless others. Well I must concede that the BPO part is new.

Well, one can even suffer the cliches if there was some more substance to it. Our protagonist is able to set up a complete fulfillment process call center in heart of rural India in flat 3 weeks time. This should bring cheer to folks who are shelling out big bucks for BPO seats in Gurgaon, Whitefield and Hiranandani. And hey - improving productivity is easy - you need to allow employees to stick photos on their desks and get their Ganesha and Krishna idols to work. Indian girls are even more easy to get - you only need to praise their work and then you could check into the Kamasutra suite with them in a hotel in the Elephanta island. And if you allow slum dwellers to eat the left overs from your plate , they will one day invite you for lunch in their hovel.

This is one of those times when one wishes he had a better command over the English language. I am sure people like K whose blog I am now following could have expressed things much better than me. He could also probably explain while some of the lousiest movies get fairly decent reviews in the press.