This piece from the Economic Times of India, though an April Fools’ Spoof, is a classic!:
She isn’t visiting a psychoanalyst yet, but Preethi Ravishankar doesn’t sleep well nights. The 27-year-old graduate of IIT, Chennai works for a three-year-old Bangalore infotech company which has been adding jobs at the expense of those of American programmers from San Jose and elsewhere in Silicon valley . She works as a javascript programmer, requiring skills that are actually a couple of pegs shallower than the ones she possesses. But she makes a good living, pulling in close to Rs 5 lakh a year already, with a career path that is all set to take her beyond the Rs 12-lakh-a-year level in less than five years.
So what’s wrong? Just this: Ravishankar is getting guilt mail in her mailbox every now and then. All of them purport to come from three out-of-work programmers from the US, accusing her and her colleagues of stealing their jobs. All of them present in graphic terms the misery that has befallen those pros who were forced to train Ravishankar and others like her.
One of them, according to the mail, is driving a truck and delivering beef across America. A second has given up hope of getting another job. A third is trying to figure out how to use her re-training grant for another job. And all of them are venomous in their allegations against Indians who’ve “robbed their livelihoods”.
Most Indian techies in Ravishankar’s shoes would shrug and say that’s the way the dice rolls: you win some, you lose some. Some believe that it’s only fair that the pie is now being shared around the world instead of being limited to the US and that professionals around the world can now expect to prosper in their own countries instead of having to make a beeline to the US. But for the more sensitive Ravishankar, the side-effect of a great job with a company that thrives on global clients is extreme guilt. It’s beginning to affect her work, even making her wonder whether she should quit.
But, she rationalises, as long as you’re competing for a job, whether locally or globally, you’ll always deprive someone else of a job that you get for yourself. Why, in that case, feel more guilty when that someone else happens to be an American in America instead of an Indian in India? But she cannot ignore that gnawing sensation that she may have been instrumental in depriving fellow professionals – and fellow human beings – of a reasonable life, and not just a job.
Her accusers have told her in their e-mail that they’ve fallen behind on their mortgage payments, that their children cannot go to camp, that they’ve had to sell their condos and rent cheap apartments. All of which is soiling her soul — and forcing her conscience to kick in.
Freudian psychology, of course, identifies guilt as the tension arising from the conflict between instinctual desires and the disciplining influence of the super-ego. And, crucially, guilt in this case is the internal punishment that a person experiences in the absence of external censure or punishment from one’s parents or society. Now, juxtapose this against Ravishankar’s predicament.
Far from censure, she and her compatriots are being feted for their success. Not only are their income levels and consumption patterns much higher up the economic scale than those of their parents’, they have also become the icons of the new, globalised India. As a result, this professional is the victim of a heightened sense of guilt.
Her response may not be shared by every other Indian techie, but that’s cold comfort to Preethi Ravishankar. All she wonders is why she feels guilty for something that’s no fault of hers – after all, she has done nothing wrong. And when she will sleep well at night again so that the code she writes the next morning is crisp and bug-free.
