Several years ago, while I was on a vacation in India, an incident happened that is now permanently etched in my brain. I can still visualize the scene, the noise, the smell, the heat and the crowds amidst which this incident happened.

In Chennai, whenever I travel alone to visit a friend or go to a temple, I ride the city bus. Though I used to drive in Chennai, numerous one-ways and the bustling traffic scares me nowadays. So I prefer my trusted companion of olden days, the city bus. As usual, it was crowded and I was standing inside. Suddenly someone in the front recognized me and shouted, “Hi! MD, how are you da?” There, a few feet in the front of the bus, was my friend who had studied with me from 6th to 10th at the public school in Mylapore. He was one of the “cool dudes” of that time; Kabadi champ, track and field champ and the leader our school scouts team. I used to envy him when he got to ride the famous Kapaleeswarar Koil Float (Theppam) on all the festival days since he was the lead scout in charge of crowd management.

I was excited to see him and I told him I was doing fine. He then asked me what I was doing and without much thought, I told him about my education, my job and my current vacation in India. Then it was my turn and I asked him what he was up to and how his life had been since school. He replied, “I am working as a peon ma, in a bank. I did not pursue much of studies. I wish I had studied like you and our other friends”. I was stupefied for a moment. My mind had unconsciously assumed that all my friends would have somehow studied and held good paying jobs. Though there is nothing demeaning being a peon, knowing his leadership and athletic skills, I expected him to be educated and working in better paying job. When I heard this from him, I did not know how to react, but somehow changed the topic into inquiring about his other best friends who he usually hung out with.

I kept thinking about this incident many times after that day. I realized the most diverse group of our friends would be our friends from our school years. Also, it is bound to be even more diverse if we studied in a public school as opposed to private schools such as DB or PSBB. At this stage in our lives, our current circle of friends converges into a homogenous group who has decent education and a good job. On the contrary, friends from our old public school would be in very different situations that we could not even imagine.

My daughter is now graduating from a public school and will soon be entering college. With my school life, college life and the years that have passed since then acting as hindsight, I can glimpse into the future of some of her friends and where their life would take them. Not everyone is choosing to enter into a four year college. Some are going to join the military at entry level. Some are going to pursue becoming a beautician or a massage therapist. Some even talk about directly starting to work as medical emergency assistant or a fire fighter. Though here in the USA such jobs are not as bad as being a peon in India, I am sure, twenty years from now, if my daughter happens to bump into some of her old friends from her school, she may have to face a similar moment. The choices we make everyday ultimately determine where we end up. I hope everyone has the capability and will to choose wisely and aim to improve their lives each day.

Updated 6 Apr 2010 – My nephew, with who i had the discussion mentioned in this post has commented.

Updated 29 Mar 2010 -  RK has written a nice rejoinder to this post on his blog. Please check it out.

Prolog

Recently, i was talking to a nephew of mine, who is studying to be an engineer,  about career choices and he was saying how he didn’t like programming and was going to stay far away from it. I didn’t think he was making the correct decisions, and i wanted to tell him a story and a lesson from my own life.

Never become a typist

As a middle class family man, my father worked extremely hard to put food on the table and to get us educated at decent institutions.  When the money was tight, aside from his regular government job, he would go out and do job typing and earn something like Rs. 0.50 per page or something like that (this is 30+ years back, don’t remember very clearly).  Obviously, a lot of back breaking work.

One day, he told me, Son, “you should never become a typist and struggle the way i do”. I would have been a 10 year old at the time he told me this.

Now i took that as the gospel truth. I have developed such a deep-rooted prejudice that i am yet to even step into a typewriting training institute.  Believe it or not, every time, i pass by a typewriting training school, the image of my father advising me comes into my mind and i don’t enter the school.

I learnt programming in the 1st year of my college and i entered the software industry soon after i finished college. I have worked in it since then for nearly 22 years now. But i am still to learn typewriting formally. I can type at a pretty good speed thanks to the donkey’s  years spent using the QWERTY keyboard.

Had i learnt typewriting formally, it would definitely have helped me with my job. The thing is, i completely misunderstood my father. He only asked that i don’t become a typist as a career choice. He never said i shouldn’t learn typewriting at all.

Programming is also a Tool

Through this story, I told my nephew that, had i thought of Typewriting as a tool and not as a career choice, i wouldn’t have made the mistake.

I told him – “In the same way, programming is a tool. There is no job on the planet that doesn’t use computers or information technology in general in some way shape or form. So, no matter what career you end up in, learning programming/computers would help you in your career.”

He seemed to understand and agree with me. Hope he will follow through and not treat Programming with the same prejudice i treated Typewriting.

Epilog

What did you think of my advice? Do you all have similar types of ill-founded prejudices in your life or am i the only one? Please chime in with your comments.

Prolog

It has been a while since i wrote on this blog. Thankfully Abdul Fakhri and Priya Raju have been doing a wonderful job of picking up the slack. 

Fine Tastings

Since this section has not been carried in a while, i decided that it may not be wise to list all the links i liked, many of which i share on my twitter account. Instead i decided to recommend 2 books that i read recently that have had a huge impact on me. The first one is world renowned executive coach Marshall Goldsmith’s What got you here won’t get you there. Marshall has plenty of free resources on his website that you can take advantage of. I am indebted to Sanjay Radhakrishnan for bringing this book to my attention. The second one is Carol Dweck’s @#$%ing brilliant book Mindset . We have been searching for the Soul of Success on this blog  . I would say Carol Dweck has captured the soul of success in her  book. I am indebted to Rajkumar Ravindranathan for recommending this book to me. If you are a parent or a leader, you must read both these books. 

Blog Milestone

I am so happy to announce that we completed 5 years on this blog on June 27, 2009. What a tremendous feeling it is to see this baby that myself and Ganesh hatched grow into a fine sparkling child.  We have now logged a whopping 5,071 comments as of today with 552 posts published.  Compared to last year, we added nearly 2,300 comments in the past 1 year, which is nearly the amount of comments we logged in the previous 4 years combined. The amount of learning that i have received through this blog and the career impact it has had dwarfs the previous 37 years of existence on this planet combined.

My informal surveys amongst the twitterers showed me that blog traffic through RSS is significantly down for the twitterers. I was worried that our blog traffic may have gone down significantly. Fortunately, that is not the case, the traffic pattern seems to be at the same levels when we hit the million page views.  All of these accomplishments would not have been possible without all of you the readers/commenters. Special thanks to commenters –  Subba Muthurangan, Senthil, PK Karthik, Vamsi Poondla, Saraswathi..  

Thank you to all the bloggers specially Abdul Fakhri, Priya Raju, Ganesh Vaideeswaran who have written some fantastic posts in the past 1 year. Hopefully, our not so active bloggers Sreedhar, Sujatha, Sultana, Sibu will blog more this year.  I am also happy to announce that Kumaran Anandan has expressed an interest in contributing to this blog. We look forward to his posts. 

Special Thanks to John Keegan and the Pressharbor team who do a fantastic job of hosting this blog.

Career Milestone

I turned 42 last month and I have been in the midst of making some life changing decisions, in part inspired my Dr. Randy Pausch . After 21 years in the industry, and 14 years in the current firm, i have taken up a part-time role in the same firm as SVP/Head of Innovation. No words of gratitude are enough to thank my management for allowing me to do this.

During the past 3.5 years, i served as the CKO and had the once in a lifetime opportunity of bringing a breakthrough innovation Cognizant 2.0 to production - thanks to a brilliant idea that  my team mate came up with. The teams that i worked with have some of the best people that i have ever seen. They are definitely going to accomplish bigger and better things. I will of course be watching with delight from a small distance away from them. The affection and kindness that my teams showered on me last month is something that will be seared into my memory. Again, mere words are grossly inadequate to thank everyone. 

What Next

While i continue work part time in my current firm, in the other part of my time, i want to chase some of my dreams. One of them is to help Priya Raju with the social entrepreneurial venture she started recently.  The second one is to work on researching the Indus Valley Civilization. I have joined a local research group – Indus Research Center, which is part of the Roja Muthiah Research Library.  There are some passionate people working in that group. I hope to contribute to the initiative and hopefully see that the Indus Script is deciphered soon.  Please wish me luck, as i pursue something that is so far away from my skillset/educational qualifications/work experience.  

Epilog

This is something i always ask every time i do a celebration post. What else can we do to improve your blogging experience on this blog? Please fire away your comments. 

Updated 2 May 2009: Received some wisdom from twitterers – @Shogun1947 @priyraju @akumaran

Prolog

On my internal to company blog i had introduced a new idea a few months back – in the prolog section of every blog post, i provide a link to interesting posts i had read that week. To my surprise, this has become very popular. This is somewhat like the FTOTW (fine tastings of the week) series i used to run on this blog. I decided to try the same idea on this blog also.

FTOTW

First, A. Prem, one of Cognizant’s Social CRM experts, blogs regularly about Social CRM on his blog. He has a tremendous grasp of the subject. He writes one of the leading blogs inside the company as well.  Rachel Laudan, one of my food anthropology blog friends, lives and blogs from Mexico. She has some great updates on the Swine Flu epidemic.  Bob Sutton paraphrases Scott Berkun to explain how managers become a**holes. How Apple Cofounder Steve Wozniak gets things done.  Saraswathi, a former colleague, who now works in the social sector, had written a brilliant post on relationships a while back. must read.

Science  & Technology Careers in America

As someone who had lived in the USA for 10 years, i feel sad about the fact that American kids don’t take up science & technology careers as much as America needs them to.  The huge skills shortage that America faces is either filled by immigration or by outsourcing to other countries like India and China.

The stats from graduate programs and PhD programs also don’t bode that well. As of 2006, over 51% in grad programs in EE were foreign nationals and 71% in PhD programs were foreign. I don’t know how accurate these stats are. But the general perception in America is that Americans don’t like science & technology careers.

Paradise of Science

During our time in America, we used to wonder about, the kind of resources that are available to an American kid that Indian kids can not even dream. Every small city has a well-stocked library, a science center in the vicinity, several museums.

Even if one is a wee bit scientifically minded, there is plenty of resources to tap into.

By contrast, a city that plays host to over 6 MM people, Chennai, India does not have one well equipped museum or science center or library.

But Indian middle class kids, are taught right from when they are in the womb, that science  & technology careers are the be-all and end-all of living in this world.  Yes, this does create a large stereotypical population. But hey, how does that matter? When we want to find folks for science & technology jobs, we can find them easily without having to import them.

I am trying to find out, why American kids consider science & technology careers boring or geeky or nerdy or whatever?

What can be done to change this attitude of the American kids?

Epilog

If i am lucky, i may get to work in a project to improve American kids’ attitude towards science & technology careers. Please help me with your wisdom.