Author :- Brijesh Nair originally from Kerala, PhD in Environmental Engineering from Arizona State University, now working as a Design Engineer in Wilson Engineers at Phoenix. Politics is his passion and some day he dreams of joining Indian politics. His hobbies include blogging, playing cricket and hiking.
My friend who was in F1 visa and doing MS in Computer Science had three jobs in hand by the middle of the Fall semester in 2000 even though he was planning to graduate by the end of Spring, May 2001. He was so confused which job to take as all three were from the cream of the Fortune 500 companies. Soon after my friend got these jobs the dot com bubble busted and American economy fell into recession. By the time he graduated in May 2001 all those three companies had already withdrawn their job offers. He got another job after six months after tons of struggle.
During the peak of dot com boom the students were very eager to finish their studies since job market was very hot. Like my friend most of them had a handful of jobs to choose from months before graduation. But recession had changed everything. Forget about multiple jobs, getting an interview call seemed to be a dream during that period. Students who were very keen to graduate started postponing their gradation indefinitely so that at least they could do some hourly job or continue with their research/teaching assistantship in campus and earn something to make both ends meet. This prevented new students coming after Fall 2001 from getting assistantship or hourly jobs and many had to survive with no job, paying full fees and with no hope of any kind of assistantship in the near future.
Companies were in a lay off spree and almost all of the start up companies closed down. Suddenly there was an influx of H1B visa holders with no job. The day you loose your job in H1B you are out of status and you should change your visa status or find another job or leave the country. With the economy in downslide it was tough for even an experienced H1B guy to find a new job. Lot of them came back to school in F1 visa to do second Masters or to do PhD just to maintain status till the recession was over. These increased the competition for hourly jobs and various assistantships and it was a sad scene to see people studying just to maintain status.
No one wanted to graduate and this made our university make a new rule. Who ever has completed all the course work should graduate in the following semester after clearing their comprehensive exam. Just to stay in status and continue doing the hourly job they had, I had friends who purposely failed the comprehensive exam (You had two attempts to pass the comprehensive exam). Once you fail in the comprehensive exam you can maintain the student status for that semester and the next semester – a perfect example of how desperate students were to stay in school.
This happened in June 2003. One of my friends who did Master’s in Electrical Engineering got an interview call from a company for a full time position. That was the time when getting even an interview call was some sort of miracle. That news about interview spread like a wild fire and everyone was talking about it. So many of my friends wanted to see my friends resume to see what was different in his resume that got him this interview call. There was absolutely no job out there during that period.
Getting scared reading this? Or are you thinking that I am exaggerating? I told these incidents to few students who are doing Masters in our school now and they just laughed at it. They couldn’t believe things could go this bad. Many of the readers of my blog are those friends who were with me during peak period of recession and everyone will agree that those were some of the toughest times in their life.
Having written all this, there was definitely light at the end of tunnel. Come Spring 2004 and recession was thing of the past and everyone was getting interview calls, job interview, and assistantships. Those who were strong hearted survived. People no longer joined for a second Masters or a PhD just for the sake of it. A wheel has turned a full circle for most of us.
India is a mess. It’s that simple, but it’s also quite complicated. I’ll start with what I think are India’s four major problems–the four most preventing India from becoming a developing nation–and then move to some of the ancillary ones.
First, pollution. In my opinion the filth, squalor and all around pollution indicates a marked lack of respect for India by Indians. I don’t know how cultural the filth is, but it’s really beyond anything I have ever encountered. At times the smells, trash, refuse and excrement are like a garbage dump. Right next door to the Taj Mahal was a pile of trash that smelled so bad, was so foul as to almost ruin the entire Taj experience. Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai to a lesser degree were so very polluted as to make me physically ill. Sinus infections, ear infection, bowels churning was an all to common experience in India. Dung, be it goat, cow or human fecal matter was common on the streets. In major tourist areas filth was everywhere, littering the sidewalks, the roadways, you name it. Toilets in the middle of the road, men urinating and defecating anywhere, in broad daylight. Whole villages are plastic bag wastelands. Roadsides are choked by it. Air quality that can hardly be called quality. Far too much coal and far to few unleaded vehicles on the road. The measure should be how dangerous the air is for one’s health, not how good it is. People casually throw trash in the streets, on the roads. The only two cities that could be considered sanitary in my journey were Trivandrum–the capital of Kerala–and Calicut. I don’t know why this is. But I can assure you that at some point this pollution will cut into India’s productivity, if it already hasn’t. The pollution will hobble India’s growth path, if that indeed is what the country wants. (Which I personally doubt, as India is far too conservative a country, in the small ‘c’ sense.)
More after the jump.
The second issue, infrastructure, can be divided into four subcategories: roads, rails and ports and the electrical grid. The electrical grid is a joke. Load shedding is all too common, everywhere in India. Wide swaths of the country spend much of the day without the electricity they actually pay for. With out regular electricity, productivity, again, falls. The ports are a joke. Antiquated, out of date, hardly even appropriate for the mechanized world of container ports, more in line with the days of longshoremen and the like. Roads are an equal disaster. I only saw one elevated highway that would be considered decent in Thailand, much less Western Europe or America. And I covered fully two thirds of the country during my visit. There are so few dual carriage way roads as to be laughable. There are no traffic laws to speak of, and if there are, they are rarely obeyed, much less enforced. A drive that should take an hour takes three. A drive that should take three takes nine. The buses are at least thirty years old, if not older. Everyone in India, or who travels in India raves about the railway system. Rubbish. It’s awful. Now, when I was there in 2003 and then late 2004 it was decent. But in the last five years the traffic on the rails has grown so quickly that once again, it is threatening productivity. Waiting in line just to ask a question now takes thirty minutes. Routes are routinely sold out three and four days in advance now, leaving travelers stranded with little option except to take the decrepit and dangerous buses. At least fifty million people use the trains a day in India. 50 million people! Not surprising that waitlists of 500 or more people are common now. The rails are affordable and comprehensive but they are overcrowded and what with budget airlines popping up in India like Sadhus in an ashram the middle and lowers classes are left to deal with the overutilized rails and quality suffers. No one seems to give a shit. Seriously, I just never have the impression that the Indian government really cares. Too interested in buying weapons from Russia, Israel and the US I guess.
The last major problem in India is an old problem and can be divided into two parts that’ve been two sides of the same coin since government was invented: bureaucracy and corruption. It take triplicates to register into a hotel. To get a SIM card for one’s phone is like wading into a jungle of red-tape and photocopies one is not likely to emerge from in a good mood, much less satisfied with customer service. Getting train tickets is a terrible ordeal, first you have to find the train number, which takes 30 minutes, then you have to fill in the form, which is far from easy, then you have to wait in line to try and make a reservation, which takes 30 minutes at least and if you made a single mistake on the form back you go to the end of the queue, or what passes for a queue in India. The government is notoriously uninterested in the problems of the commoners, too busy fleecing the rich, or trying to get rich themselves in some way shape or form. Take the trash for example, civil rubbish collection authorities are too busy taking kickbacks from the wealthy to keep their areas clean that they don’t have the time, manpower, money or interest in doing their job. Rural hospitals are perennially understaffed as doctors pocket the fees the government pays them, never show up at the rural hospitals and practice in the cities instead.
I could go on for quite some time about my perception of India and its problems, but in all seriousness, I don’t think anyone in India really cares. And that, to me, is the biggest problem. India is too conservative a society to want to change in any way. Mumbai, India’s financial capital is about as filthy, polluted and poor as the worst city imaginable in Vietnam, or Indonesia–and being more polluted than Medan, in Sumatra is no easy task. The biggest rats I have ever seen were in Medan!
One would expect a certain amount of, yes, I am going to use this word, backwardness, in a country that hasn’t produced so many Nobel Laureates, nuclear physicists, imminent economists and entrepreneurs. But India has all these things and what have they brought back to India with them? Nothing. The rich still have their servants, the lower castes are still there to do the dirty work and so the country remains in stasis. It’s a shame. Indians and India have many wonderful things to offer the world, but I’m far from sanguine that India will amount to much in my lifetime.
Now, have at it, call me a cultural imperialist, a spoiled child of the West and all that. But remember, I’ve been there. I’ve done it. And I’ve seen 50 other countries on this planet and none, not even Ethiopia, have as long and gargantuan a laundry list of problems as India does. And the bottom line is, I don’t think India really cares.
Comment by the agonist — March 30, 2009 @ 3:46 am
This is a great post and something we have been writing about extensively as well at e3visa.info. The US visa holder having no rights to unemployment (even though paying for many year into Social Security) and having such strict rules with in status and out of status and time limits to change employers are often forced as you say into this endless loop of transferring to visa just to maintain status. It becomes much more impossible to go home and try and apply for work from there.
Comment by CJ — April 3, 2009 @ 5:27 am
I agree. I m in India now , was a while in West….anyways I have always been a centre of jokes coz I carry my trash back home….probably 1 of those rare people in Mumbai. My boyfriend too belongs to the lot described above which irritates me to no end.However off late I have made him to pick up trash from road whenever he chucks something out. He hates me for it, but still does it. Just an example to tell you…we all can try to make a difference!!!
Comment by Trupti — April 5, 2009 @ 3:10 am
The two types of recession are totally different. The recession caused by the I.T. Bubble burst affected comparitively few sectors which relied upon the IT and technological sector. It should be noted that, many other fields remained safe during the I.T.Bubble burst. Where as the current recession is much worser because of its direct relation with the financial sector.And the Financial recessions usually takes a longer time if it is directly affected.
After the I.T. bubble burst, the concentration of Investment was concentrated to the Real Estate Bubble. We can expect the recession to get over util some other booming sector come up with promising rewards to their investors. Util such success stories are heard, this situation is not gonna change. The time period for the recession to get over as Brijesh mentioned seems like a speculation because of the unpredictability, but the solutions he proposed are to be considered, seriously.
Comment by Tony — April 19, 2009 @ 9:06 am
This is the fact that due to recession, international students had to face many problems while getting H1b visa, but now recession period is over and we just hope that now this problem overcomes.
Comment by Immigration1 — October 14, 2009 @ 5:56 pm
I am a J2EE developer and me and many of my frnds were on bench for quite a while .. but being a “never give up” guy i learned new skills/technology and i am on job now … i am helping a frnd too to change to new techs where there is demand even in recession … but things have improved since September and lets hope they will keep improving
Comment by Raj — October 24, 2009 @ 11:19 am
thanks for such a detailed insight of the times which were not good.the recession now cannot be compared with the recession then.things are much worse now,,im still jobless coz i want to do a job that gives me money and respect,all jobs im getting are of lesser pay packages.i always see quality in watever i do,but in recession quality is rare commodity..USA is just like ‘rahu grah’,either it takes u to peak or pushes u back to the ground,in both cases its result is mind boggling.I hope after 3 years recession is over whn my MBA would be completed from US and jobs will be there.
Comment by sahil — October 31, 2009 @ 1:14 am