I’m a member, so I did a quick search and copy/paste for you Strag…
nytimes.com/2004/07/17/inter … 7fpro.html
A Young American Outsources Himself to India
By AMY WALDMAN
Published: July 17, 2004
ANGALORE, India
THE rooftop terrace at Cosmo Village was crowded with young partygoers savoring the temperate night air, oversize Kingfisher beers, and their place in this moment of global economic convergence.
At one table, five friends from Singapore sat with a 6-foot-3, 23-year-old anomaly: Joshua Bornstein, perhaps the only native-born American among the Bangalore-based employees of Infosys Technologies, one of India’s software and services giants, and one of the few Americans of his generation in Bangalore.
For all the complaints about American jobs migrating here through outsourcing, few Americans have thought to follow them. Eight months ago, Josh Bornstein did.
He quit his job at an investment banking firm in Los Angeles and came to this southern city on the Deccan plateau. He pays $110 a month to share a two-bedroom apartment with a Japanese roommate. He takes the company bus to work at the Infosys campus, as lush and large as Microsoft’s in Seattle. He has Indian, European, Israeli and Asian friends, and he has become a familiar figure on this city’s thriving pub scene. “Everyone talks about globalization left and right,” he said. “This is the way the world is moving.”
Perhaps so, but he is the only one of his friends in the United States who even considered going to India for work after college.
He has become a member of a cosmopolitan village that has formed as multinational companies flock here, and Indian companies try to become multinationals. The city is full of foreigners - 10,000 to 12,000 are registered here with the government’s office of foreign registration. At some bars, the crowds are so mixed they look as if they could be in London.
The foreigners are staffing multinational companies and filling five-star hotels to overflowing. Those here for longer stints are living in exclusive housing complexes, and international schools are springing up for their children.
Few Americans are among them, even though previous generations of young American graduates have pursued literary careers in Paris or tried to take capitalism and democracy to Russia and Eastern Europe. India would seem a logical next choice, given an economy that grew by 8.2 percent last year, a software and services sector that grew by 28 percent last year and the way outsourcing is rewriting the rules of the American and the global economy.
But most Americans still feel India can teach them more about spiritual practices than business models. Not Mr. Bornstein. On his first weekend, he met a Westerner who said he came to India because his guru told him to. “I can’t really relate to that,” said Mr. Bornstein, who was raised in Chicago.
HE first learned about Infosys, which has 25,000 employees, through its summer global internship program, which this year received 8,500 applications for 75 spots. Mr. Bornstein ended up being one of them in 2001 when a summer job in San Francisco fell through after the high-tech economy tanked. A friend told him about Infosys, and he figured it could be his only chance both to go to India and to get a summer job.
The experience helped him collar four job offers after graduation from Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif. He chose an investment bank in Los Angeles, which he found too hierarchical. Miserable there, he got in touch with his old boss at Infosys, and soon had a job in Bangalore.
He works in corporate planning, helping seven units hone their business plans, and regularly sits in on meetings with the Infosys chief executive, Nandan Nilekani, and other senior executives.
Infosys is one of many companies whose gain has been American software programmers’ loss in this era of outsourcing. Mr. Bornstein extends his sympathy but wonders why Americans so readily accepted the “made in China” label when that cost “thousands or even millions of jobs lost.”
He does not see himself as taking sides, but as gaining experience. “It is impossible I would have a similar experience in my life at this stage in the United States,” he said.
(Page 2 of 2)
He knows Indian culture places a high value on experience, and he is lucky that his height masks his youth. “I’ve lied more about my age here than I ever have,” Mr. Bornstein said. “Honestly, I don’t know if Nandan knows how old I am.”
As it turns out, Mr. Nilekani did not.
“How old is he?” he asked.
“My God,” he said when he heard.
MR. BORNSTEIN does not dwell on whether his American identity has allowed him to leapfrog to a higher position than would be available to a 23-year-old Indian, and neither does Mr. Nilekani. As he sees it, Mr. Bornstein’s attributes of intelligence and a positive attitude are supplemented by his cultural perspective.
Advertisement
The company wants to become truly multinational and multicultural, able to win business in any country. That requires interaction with other nationalities, but most of Infosys’s 650 or so foreign employees work in the company’s offices abroad. “When the bulk of the working population is here, we also need to create some diversity here so people are comfortable in working with people with different cultures,” Mr. Nilekani said.
He said he would clone Mr. Bornstein if he could. He has a boy-next-door appeal, a studied pace of speech that suggests a brain at work.
He brings an unusual adaptability: a curiosity toward, but no critique of, other cultures. Sixty percent of his Indian friends’ marriages were arranged. He wonders if the pressures to please a large family outweigh the option of pleasing oneself, but resists the temptation to pass judgment. “If someone is happy doing that, it’s not my role to criticize.”
More than cultural differences, more than power outages and rough roads, he finds the extremes of wealth and poverty hard to take, feeling guilt at having mastered the skill of ignoring the beggar in front of him.
His parents, a lawyer and an academic, fostered independence and a sense of responsibility in Mr. Bornstein, their eldest son. They, like their son, favor what he calls the “calculated risk.” At one point, his father, tired of Chicago, moved the family to Colorado with no new job. It worked out fine.
Mr. Bornstein describes himself as “marginally kosher.” For Passover, his parents sent food; Infosys provided a cook so he could keep kosher.
He works 10- to 12-hour days, but lives well. His salary is less than a third of what he earned in Los Angeles but he is still able to save a few hundred dollars a month and afford the Champagne Brunch at the Leela Palace hotel, where the French chef is a friend. “I’m enjoying myself,” he said.
There is only one problem. Mr. Bornstein’s girlfriend of five and a half years is in the United States. His plan was to stay two or three years; she does not want to wait. These are days of decision.
Whenever he leaves, though, his legacy is already secure: he is devising a recruiting plan so Mr. Nilekani can lure more Americans to Bangalore.
