Software and the Malayalee !!

This piece was written in 2000, so some of the software concepts may sound a little dated. However, for those in software, that may also be a walk down a recent memory lane. There are some Malayalam words interspersed into the text in context. Their approximate meanings are as follows:

Idlis : rice pancakes
PARAYADA : Say it (give me the answer), you idiot
Crorepatis : People with 10 million (in context, won in the TV Millionaire Quiz Show)
OPPIKKAL : The gentle art of making do with the mediocre or unsatisfactory
quality : Kwality, a brand of ice-cream that was available in Kerala

(A not-so-light-hearted look at Kerala’s software development scenario)

The hype about the earning potential in the software industry has every Malayalee mother’s heart palpitating with the thought of imminent transcendence of her family’s plight from Jones-watching to watched-Jones. Her son (and latterly, her daughter) is going to make good just as soon as he/she completes his(her) expensive course on the latest fad sweeping through the town’s abundant software educational centres. She has chosen well – she carefully consulted that US returnee who married her cousin’s daughter. She scoured all over town to find the most elegant shop with the latest furniture and the flashiest colour screens. There, that nice-looking girl, who spoke such good English, told her confidentially that not many people realised that the coffee-bean course virtually guaranteed a swarm of eager American billionaires at her son’s feet. Now, having sold the land her late husband left her and the gold she brought with her when she married, she sits back and dreams of the day her child will return from the US to claim that extremely snooty child of that vulgarly rich estate owner who splashed her with muddy water last June. Maybe she would make an offer for the estate itself!

In that plush software training centre, her child pokes diffidently on the keyboard and tentatively slides the mouse around while simultaneously trying to left-right-and-double-click, just as the instructor spouts another acronym and eyes the ankles of his latest protege. Images and sounds blur his vision and hearing as that whiz-kid from four computers away tells him to wrap that nifty code he has mailed him with some curly brackets and press the GO button. The nightmare follows him home, as he desperately tries to recall exactly what XML-linked VTOC-ISAM will mesh with the HTTP-ADO-CORBA (or was it cobra?) to spill coffee all over the screen. Giving up in some disgust after trying to connect to the internet with the flashy new computer, modem, telephone and ISP pack that his mother bought from that nice consultant who said he was doing her a real favour at that price, he surfs through the channels on the TV desperately looking for something to take his mind off the gnawing feeling that the course will end in fourteen days. And apart from that piece of code he pinched from the CD that came with the last edition of that popular computer magazine, there is nothing he can show prospective employers about his ability with and understanding of computers.

D-Day has come and gone. Mother waits expectantly for the billionaires to show. Son says he is going to a friend’s place to catch up with the nuances of the latest version of coffee-bean software, and ends up at the cinema after being snubbed at the cyber cafe where he hoped to learn just that little bit more about that client-server thing the guy asked him about at the last place he visited (God, has it been 87 interviews already?). He is no longer welcome at the educational centre unless he wants to sign up for the new course on Expresso. Finally, he decides, enough is enough, and puts up a board outside his house “Software Consultant”. Dons new shirt, trousers and loafers, and joins with three of his classmates from the institute who have visited Bombay, Chennai, Hyderabad and Bangalore, and are finding it difficult to sit through breakfast as their parents thrust Ads pages and hot new billion-making software items from the newspapers between them and the idlis.

They hire a house and scour the streets, walking into shops, offices and factories just like the tens of thousands who have gone before them. Exhausted after nine months of trudging, it finally dawns on them that the instructor at that institute really didn’t know what he was talking about. What the hell, if he could get away with it, so can we. And so, armed with a little more loot from home and a bit of money they managed to lick off that unsuspecting banker’s shoes, they buy some plush new furniture and some flashy colour screens, hire a fast-talking nice-looking girl, and hey presto! A new software educational institution is born.

They are the lucky ones. Some poor unfortunates who had some talent for merging recursive structures into database accesses decided to open a software development centre (not for them of the high ideals the creaming of money from yet another crop of expectant (sic.) mothers). For a while, things look like they are going well. They’ve made this nifty accounting package and coupled it with a point-of-sale terminal, and pretty soon three shops have installed this gem and are trying to enter item codes and account heads. Since neither the software guys nor the shop owners have any real idea about using software for accounting or the science of developing coding systems, each starts naming the other for the kleptomaniac who has had a field day last Tuesday. So the mad rush begins to recruit a few “juniors” who can be sent to the shops to keep the user from clogging up the cell-phone from which prospective new shops are being tele-reached. These juniors swagger in with the assurance that their employers are past it, not having heard about the merger between the coffee-bean software company and the prophetic database major. Pretty soon, there’s a raging battle and the threat of a couple of lawsuits. The seniors silently close their desk drawers and leave for Dubai, where they scrape up the vacancy from the departure of the last Malayalee upstart and eke out a double-shift with a little moonlighting on the side to keep the home fires burning where their mothers wait expectantly for their sons’ names to collectively change to Sabeer Bhatia.

What is it that stunts the Malayalee in his own backyard ?

The swagger is the first trait that limits him. Find a Malayalee who is prepared to say he doesn’t know something – a quick check into his background will reveal that his Malayalee credentials don’t hold up. Some poor unfortunate genes from some other lowly race have contaminated his blood.

The lack of interest in actually pursuing a subject for the pure joy of learning something in depth is another. Having been beaten from the age of two by a towering father who screams “PARAYADA” each time he is stuck for the name of the capital of Outer Mongolia, his aversion to anything that remotely looks like a book with knowledge sits deep in his psyche. He has crammed or cheated his way through high school and sat through years of undergraduate education at some second-rate college, scraping through with a pass or, if his teacher has taken a shine to him, a high second class. Now he waits expectantly for his reward. Must he actually try and learn something else (or even actually learn something for the first time?).

English is a sore point. He is sure he knows it. He is sure he understands it, maybe even better than the English, judging by the fact that the average English tourist he meets seems to speak with a swollen tongue, using words he is sure appear in the Greek or Turkish dictionary. And why should he have to read the User Manual or Language Reference for coffee beans? (see first two traits above – also, assuming that the software training institution actually had a copy of these redundant tomes). When he finally goes out into the big wide world and faces a prospective employer or an irate customer, inside his head he screams “Don’t you understand English?”, not realising that what he said was a poor apology for what he meant. The handicap that this poses to his becoming a good software professional is one of the most underestimated measures in his mixed bag of achievements.

When he finally lands a job in a good software organisation, he has arrived – must he work, too? Surely, work is a place for time-pass, the eternal quest of the Malayalee to quench the restlessness of everyday humdrum. The place to exchange news about parents, relatives, friends, whiz-kids, TV crorepatis, and members of the opposite sex – mostly, members of the opposite sex. Or, even better, time-pass with a member of the opposite sex. This, in the midst of birthdays, engagements, weddings and funerals of his grand-uncle’s wife’s brother’s aunt on his mother’s side. The poor entrepreneur who has desperately entered into an agreement to deliver this monumental software bread-slicer in an unimaginably short time for a small fraction of the estimate that the buyer had from a seasoned developer in his own country, bites his nails and writes endless memos and tracks numerous work records as the deadline slowly but surely looms closer on the wall calendar. The Malayalee, meanwhile, reviews his own code obligation against his personal deadline, and says, what the hell, why have they given me three weeks for this task, it will really only take a couple of hours, just need to drag twenty-seven components on to the form and write seventeen lines of event code, let’s talk meanwhile. Or surf for that latest salacious site (you don’t allow free access to the internet? What kind of employer are you? How’s a guy supposed to keep up with the latest trends in esoteric binding?).

The result? To the Malayalee, quality is the name of an ice-cream. The big word in the Malayalee’s vocabulary is “OPPIKKAL”. It’s truly amazing how this word substitutes for the ISO 9000s and SEI CMMs of the developed world’s view of quality. This is Kerala, man, we get coconuts from tall trees on sand-swept beaches, and tea from green carpets on verdant hills, you don’t really expect someone in God’s Own Country to have to stoop to worrying about whether something actually works as intended. God in His various Manifestations on the sides of our pot-holed roads will ward off the evil day that the software actually does not perform (when it is installed for the first time). By that time, God Willing, this Malayalee will be in even greener pastures.

Writing specifications? Modelling? Writing Instruction Manuals? Documenting code? Writing anything at all, apart from the event drivers? You’ve got to be kidding, that’s not the job of a software professional, hire some English-speaking nursemaid to mop up where the code left off.

When the Malayalee actually manages to leave his beloved homeland and find employment somewhere else in India or abroad, a transformation takes place. This is nothing short of phenomenal, and must be witnessed to be believed. The swagger transforms into a humble slouch. The English newspaper begins to get opened to pages other than the sports section. The dust on the manuals begins to fall off. The screen, keyboard and mouse become the sole objects of the Malayalee software professional’s concentration during working hours. For the first time, he actually writes down what he is going to do, then does it, and writes down what he did and how it may be useful (this last is a bit of an exaggeration, but at least the intentions have changed for the good). And the employer looks on benevolently, knowing that he has landed one of the most sought-after of species for the price of a couple of hamburgers and a condominium.

Why? There are no obvious answers. Bring the Malayalee back into his beloved homeland, and witness the reverse transformation. Only, it’s a little bit worse, there are still a few dollars or dirhams to flash around, and there’s a little bit of knowledge that rubbed itself on during his tenure abroad. Fear not, it will soon meld into the ocean of obsolescence as he remembers “PARAYADA” and avoids all further learning. He isn’t hurt too much by it, there’s the moolah that came with the estate-rich girl, and there are all those expectant mothers hanging on to his every word about Paradise and God’s Own Country being separated by a couple of oceans. And the cycle of life has taken one more turn.

The solution? The easy one. If you must set up a software shop and hire Malayalees, do it outside Kerala. On the other hand, if you want to set up a software shop in Kerala, hire Andhraites, Bengalis, Gujaratis, Mexicans, Andalusians, dolphins or monkeys – anything but Malayalees. Otherwise, set up a training institution or low-level data-entry (transcription, call it what you will) or web-page development sweat shop. But software development? Welcome to the club of unshaven sunken-eyed entrepreneurs in ragged clothing who dreamt of taking Malayalees, with their high literacy and educational achievement claims, and making of them a world-recognised truly professional wonderful software organisation. (Those that haven’t actually fled and rediscovered the joy of programming again in some desert).

Does this bear out? Take a trip to Technopark or the Software Technology Parks, those icons of Kerala’s assertion of coming of age in information technology. Carefully assess the actual work going on. Find out if any more than a very few workers there are actually engaged in software development. Count the number of training shops. Talk to a couple of actual software development entrepreneurs. Ask them what they feel is the single largest threat to their establishment. No, it’s not the government. No, it’s not customs. No, it’s not poor communications. No, it’s even not the lack of electricity. Yes, it is employee separation and employee productivity, and the lack of ice-cream (quality, that is).