For expat workers, it’s ‘incredible India’

Shane Warne still carries canned juices from Australia when in India as he is still wary of anything liquid that is non alcoholic in our country.
His caginess about India continues despite his having toured regularly from 1996 and having been extended regal Rajput hospitality as the anchor of the Rajasthan Royals team. But Warne is an aberration now. Till the eighties, Caucasians would find a trillion reasons not to come to India and if at all they did, they would limit their visits to a whistle stop tour. Till the early nineties, several foreign banks had to cajole their senior Caucasian managers to consider an Indian deployment with the bait of a “hazard bonus”. Once here, they did not complain one bit as they would be put up in Malabar Hills or Lutyens’ Delhi or Kolkata’s Alipore district where they rubbed shoulders with even more privileged Indians who were typically scions of noble families or inheritors of bountiful businesses or fat cat lawyers and politicians. And yet pocketed the hazard bonus! No longer.
India the place to be

Expats are now making a beeline for India. Those who have been here for a few years are clutching on to their seats as the prospect of going home brings with it the potential likelihood of a job loss. Some are even tying the nuptial knot with Indian ladies to seek domicile status in a country that they had once associated with the rope trick. Those who are about to be rendered redundant abroad are imploring with their company’s HR relocation advisors to find them a job within the company in India. Hazard bonus be damned. They are more than happy to settle for local salaries.
Reverse syndrome

Mr Barack Obama and Mr Gordon Brown are probably blind to this syndrome as they attempt to regulate the migration of Indian professionals into their respective countries. The tide of migration has changed direction. Yet many companies in India appear to be much too accommodating of Caucasian job aspirants.
There are unconfirmed reports that the federal government is toying with the idea of extending the embargo on expats in critical roles that is already applicable to telecom companies to other sectors as well. Their cause has been served well by a certain Mr Dean Headley whose fair skin was a passport to anywhere he wanted to be in India.
Just as the US and UK immigration departments expect their recruiting companies to articulate extremely compelling arguments to justify the hiring of an Asian, India is believed to be readying to reciprocate this gesture. To extend this point, what is it that an expat Caucasian manager brings to the party in a real estate management, corporate services, administrative or corporate security function that an Indian can’t? On the contrary, they would be challenged by their ignorance of turf issues, cultural and linguistic differences and similar road blocks. Are we sensing a glass ceiling here? Before independence, our tea and jute industries were over populated primarily by the Scottish who were as distant from the intellectual rigor of Eaton and Oxbridge as they were from the genteel persuasions of our royalty. I remember an American who led the sub continental operations of a bank that I worked for whose only claim to fame was having Vietnam on his resume and his ability to out drink all of us.

The author is a veteran corporate analyst and can be reached at chiranjit.bangalore@gmail.com