The ongoing backlash in the US against job losses to Indian techies has found a place even in the famous cartoon strip Dilbert, the latest of which (September 15, 2003) goes on to take a dig at IIT grads from India.
Asok, the brilliant but naive Indian trainee, the cynical Wally and the ever-sceptical Alice are sitting in the boardroom with the pointy-haired Boss. Asok says that though he was the project manager, nobody replied to his e-mail.
However, he is proud of the fact that he is an IIT graduate and considers himself superior to his counterparts and thus had been able to finish the project himself. When Wally asks him, “Are you tired?”, he replies: “I am trained to only sleep during National Holidays”.
And this spoof shows up the threat of Indian takeover in global arena specially in the field of technology. It also show up the Indian techie - the IITian - as he is perceived by his colleagues: a work maniac who has inhuman abilities to slog and thus outpace his American counterparts.
India’s IITs have, of course, been the subject of admiration - now bordering on envy - in corporate America for more than five years now. A 1998 BusinessWeek article on India’s whiz kids has this to say for IITians: “The rise of IITians, as they are known, is a telling example of how global capitalism works today. The best companies draw on the best brains from around the world, and the result is a global class of worker: the highly educated, intensely ambitious college grad who seeks out a challenging career, even if it is thousands of miles from home. By rising to the top of Corporate America, these alumni lead all other Asians in their ability to reach the upper echelons of world-class companies.”
A researcher at UC Berkeley estimated that fully 20 per cent of start-ups in Silicon Valley are IITian-owned. Amazon.com CEO and founder Jeff Bezos has described the Indian IITian as a “world treasure.” Bill Gates says the computer industry has benefited greatly from them.
Besides graduates of the prestigious IITs, where the quality of technical training is comparable to the best of the educational institutes in the world, India has a growing bank of 4.1 million technical workers, supplied by over 1,800 educational institutions and polytechnics. These train more than 67,785 computer software professionals every year - many of whom are a threat to America’s homegrown computer jocks in the competition for jobs.
With the recent swell in outsourcing key software development jobs to India - coming on top of the BPO migration - a mixture of awe and resentment about India’s brainpower is beginnning to develop. The American media have so far been mostly kind to IITs and IITians. CBS 60 Minutes had a very flattering portrayal of IITs recently. In fact, a co-anchor on CBS 60 Minutes had gone on to describe IIT Bombay thus: “Put Harvard, MIT and Princeton together, and you begin to get an idea of the status of this school in India.”
But as usual, cartoonist Scott Adams - who draws and writes the Dilbert strip six days a week, is probably ahead of the pack in anticipating media and public opinion about IIT grads.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/xml/uncomp/articleshow?msid=182963
…we might not have the facilites in pakistan that are present in india in IIT and we might not have that many paki grads…but our pakistani grads r no less in any way if not better…