The Real Deal: Rajgopal Sukumar on Reverse Immigration Shock

This continues a series of  guest columns from practitioners and bloggers I respect. The category - The Real Deal describes them well.

Mobile labor is increasingly a global reality. While we struggle with the concept of "immigration", in reality labor movements are not one way any more. My father-in-law used to describe his family moving back to Ireland from LA 80 years ago. It was a traumatic multi-week journey. Today, in a few hours you can fly somewhere and global movers can have your belongings already re-located. And in reverse a few years later. Labor may not yet be as mobile as capital, but it is becoming much more so, especially executive talent.

Sukumar, Chief Knowledge Officer for Cognizant, decided to move back to India after a decade in the US. Given that India is changing even faster than the West, I thought it would be interesting to get his perspective on moving back.

"After spending 10 years in the US, I recently relocated to Chennai, India. As everyone will attest, India has changed dramatically. Or is it just me? I work for the same company and that has made the transition so much easier, but everywhere around there is change.

In general, there is a lot of new ideas and optimism about the future. Case in point is IBM’s Sam Palmisano’s favorite company—Bharti Airtel, one of the largest private cell phone service providers in India. It keeps customer management and marketing in-house and outsources everything else to IBM. A business model like that would have been impossible to think about in India few years ago. But for bold moves like at Bharti Airtel, many companies, still are run with old ideas of management. Perhaps, with more globalization and more expatriates coming to work in India, we may be forced to adopt best practices faster.

Customer service appears to have improved. When I decided to buy my car, I first went to a dealer, like I did in the US . But later, one of my colleagues suggested the dealer would bring the car to my house for a test drive and complete the transaction right there. Similarly, I could get a mortgage without having to go to the bank.

SMS rules here. Every one seems to have a cell phone and SMS has become a key mode of communication. Even the neighborhood vegetable vendor takes orders by SMS. A local restaurant has a mobile number to SMS your complaints. In Chennai, if you are caught in an accident, you can call the police by SMS!

 

No Voice Mails just Missed Calls.   I was a bit miffed that almost all the mobile numbers I called did not have voice mail and I thought maybe India has not advanced to the Voice Mail culture. As I was wondering about this Voice Mail stuff, one of my colleagues called me and inquired why I hadn't called him back. When I denied having received any call from him, he said he had "given me a Missed Call". Slowly it dawned on me that, because caller-id is pervasive, when you call someone and disconnect after the first 1 or 2 rings, your number appears in the list of Missed Calls. The tacit expectation here is that you keep checking your Missed Calls and call them back. Upon further inquiry, I learnt that you have to pay more for voice mail and any case, most often, you just leave a v-mail with a contact number to call back and Missed Call does exactly that free of charge! An example of Indian ingenuity.  

Household economics are almost completely reversed from the US. Labor continues to be cheap in India notwithstanding the recent spurts in pay in the IT industry. You can get a good car driver in Chennai for $100 per month. Real estate is just the opposite. Condo prices have reached a $1MM dollar mark in Chennai recently – these are high end ones but even the reasonably good ones hover around the $200,000 mark in prime localities, up 100-200% over the past 2-3 years.

One thing which did not surprise me coming back is the traffic. It has gotten worse, with no end in sight. But in balance, the move back has been fascinating. – more positive than negative. Definitely reverse culture shock, though."

Sukumar has over 18 years IT industry experience much of it helping hone Cognizant's Global Delivery Model. So imagine the culture shock someone less traveled would feel! Read his blog at http://sastwingees.blogharbor.com/blog.