I was always under the impression that services industry is the best thing to have happened to India. It was giving jobs to the unemployed, 'twas giving India a global identity and was attracting the rare FDI trickle into the country. But ever since I have come to Gurgaon, not one day passes when I come to realize that all this is a big farce. The services industry is not giving anything back to India. It is only a money game at the end of it and the day India loses this advantage to a Manila or a Beijing, that would be the end of the game. I see call centre crowd outside the huge glass towers. Girls smoking cigarettes because the work pressure is too much to handle. I see a frustrated breed of people, increasing in number every day, who know that the job is worth nothing and it is repetitive and redundant but still, they are forced to do it.

I see people logging in long hours at work because some client sitting in the US or UK wants cheap work done at the click of a finger. I also see young men and women dropping out from college to join a call centre, thus giving up the faint chance of making a better career in the future. In India, a whole bunch of young people, are logging in wierd hours at their office; trying to work in the US shifts in India; which is affecting them personally as well as professionally. Is this the legacy that we, the young turks of the enterprise called India, would want to leave behind. I can hardly see anyone passionate about building, making, creating or manufacturing these days. Everyone wants to sit on the BPO boom and go wroooooooom. No one is concerned, neither the leaders, nor the government and the Indian people have long acclimatized themselves to live with what they have got; even a second rate life would do.

A visit to those gigantic malls is like a randezvous with reality. I see potters from the villages putting bricks on the parking space meant for the visitors to the malls. I also see little kids, of an age when they would be better off in school, cleaning tables at McDonald's. Its embarassing. As an Indian, it never ceases to amaze me, what we are doing with India and lo behold, even I am a a part of it.