THE WHITE TIGERS..

“India may not have electricity or drinking water or proper roads or sewage system, but it certainly does have thousands of entrepreneurs, most in the field of technology where they have set up outsourcing companies that virtually run America. “ – Says Aravind Adiga in his book, The White Tiger.

India was on the verge of becoming the global H.Q of IT industry. B.E graduates kept changing their jobs – as often as nasty fights in the parliament – with higher paychecks and a plushier lifestyle. Night life was at its best and pubs were overflowing with working class youngsters. Indians working in outsourcing companies and call centers – a place where Ramasamys, Navins and Vimalas pretend to be Romarios, Nevilles and Victorias to their lazy American callers and make them understand that the monitor has to be plugged to the CPU for watching a movie! – were being paid well and most made it their permanent job.

But a series of unexpected financial disasters, with many banks and insurance companies claiming bankruptcy, led to an economic meltdown. This financial crisis is the worst ever recorded since the Great Depression. Economic Meltdown, Global recession, Pink Slips… Words and phrases of the business jargon have become household terms.

Delaying any salary hike and also reducing the salary caps; large-scale layoffs are the methods that companies have resorted to for battling the ongoing financial crisis. The pubs are nearly deserted, party-animals have reverted to their normal self and window-shoppers have outnumbered actual shoppers by a whopping margin in super-malls. And students have been hit hard by this economic recession. People who kept changing jobs at will are clinging on to their jobs desperately with fear pangs clouding over their job security (comparable to the insecure post of Pakistan Cricket coach!).

An even imminent danger that pundits envision is unemployment, a word that has lost its fame ever since the IT industry invaded our country. Images of Kollywood movies that thrived on the subject of unemployment juxtaposes in my mind as I try to visualize the ominous impending situation. The heroes of the 90s used to wear intensely sparking shiny shirts and baggy jeans. And they went around the city wooing a girl and finally winning her… A seemingly happy ending but the guy did not have any job to make a living! These scenes, which seemed obscure to me during the IT boom, are now gaining more relevance !

In these troubled times when such images, buried under the garbage heaped behind video shops in the form of video cassettes, come alive and haunt us, one word stands out as a solution… ENTREPRENEUR.
An entrepreneur is someone who organizes a business venture and assumes the risk for it. Reading between the lines, the word risk is to be noted. 1/3rd of the entrepreneurs are lucky silver spooned morons*, who own companies that have been bequeathed by their fathers. While the rest – the rare breed – have had to grind hard and sweat it out to smell success. These self-made entrepreneurs are unperturbed by recessions and undisturbed by any financial crisis…shaken but not stirred. Man usually performs well in a nothing-else-to-lose situation and most of the self-made entrepreneurs, who have defied the Murphy’s Law and risen against the odds, are stellar examples of it.

Millions of college goers in our nation, after under-graduation, head for higher studies or take up a subservient job at an MNC. But very few students have treaded the road less travelled and become self-made entrepreneurs, scaling heights that other people can only dream of. And classifying them according to the states, there are effectively very few in each region which makes them a special one-in-a-million phenomenon… Like the few white tigers in a large tiger population!

The world is hot, flat and crowded. Thinking out of the box, however whacky it is, can turn out to be fruitful. If everyone in the world had taken up an ordinary nine-to-five**, i.e, without any new self-made entrepreneurs… you wouldn’t be using the PC or the iPod, had Steve Jobs and Bill Gates chosen to take up normal jobs; had Evan Williams not launched Pyra Labs, you wouldn’t even be reading this blog !
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*An expletive for those lucky morons coz my dad doesn’t own a company
** With call centers and BPOs, the phrase ‘nine-to-five’ is no longer very relevant!