In Bangalore, India's high-tech capital, two people have been killed and at least nine injured in sychronized bomb blasts. A police commissioner told the AP that the seven grenade-like blasts occurred within minutes of each other across the city. Bangalore is home to several U.S. tech companies' Indian offices, as well as outsourcing firms which do business with the U.S. (Photo by The Hindu)
Fox Television has noticed that there is a wide, wide world out there that hasn't yet been the recipient of Fox's unique brand of entertaining and educational TV programming. So they're going to bring it to them, and if they make a little money in the process, all the better! In the meantime, Conde Nast is launching a version of Wired magazine in the UK, and they've already launched some of their premium titles in India (Vogue India! GQ India!). What's going on here? The world is flat. And it's a great place to set a television, magazine, and big pile of money.
Further cause for existential despair in journalism: the (Pulitzer-Prize winning!) OC Register is going to outsource some of its copy editing and layout work to a company in India. But uh, don't worry staffers, it's only a test! A test which will inevitably lead to foreigners taking good old American journalism jobs. Don't be fooled by management doublespeak. It's time to panic!
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales's travel budget has tightened since the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit which pays Wikipedia's and Wales's bills, cracked down on his expense account. Last year, he told Reuters that he used a website, Extrabed.in, to secure a free crashpad with an Indian blogger on a trip to the subcontinent. "When I used ExtraBed to find a place to stay, I was excited to have the opportunity to meet a new family, a new friend," Wales emailed Reuters. That rings true enough; Wales is often excited to meet new friends, especially female ones, and he's too busy to pay much attention to his old family. (Still from Majestikx12)
Google has reportedly turned over the necessary information to identify an Orkut user who wrote "I hate Sonia Ghandi." The Indian government had the name of the perpetrator, Rahul Vaid, but Google provided the IP address that pinpointed his location. This is not the first time Google has helped a foreign government go after its own citizens. After the jump, Boing Boing TV filmed the art pranksters from the Billboard Liberation Front and Monochrom teaming up to help Google advertise their close relationship with the ruling Chinese Communist Party's Internet censors — on the day of Google's annual shareholder meeting, no less. "Do no evil" seems pretty darn flexible if you're a moral relativist with profitable interests in international markets.
Mark Zuckerberg's in India, we hear. Is he there on holiday, or working to launch Facebook India? The answer's unclear, but Indian gossip website Techgoss.com wants to know the answer pretty badly. So badly that they're offering a 10,000-rupee reward for anyone who turns up photos of Zuckerberg and a detailed story on what he's up to. That translates to $250 — or a week's wages for an Indian computer programmer. (Photoillustration by Jackson West)
Overseas outsourcing of newspaper jobs started years ago as a slow trickle, mostly from IT departments and the like. As the financial prospects of the newspaper industry have declined, outsourcing has come to be viewed as more of a necessity. Even news jobs have been sent to India, although that is still a relative rarity. More common—and more threatening, if you happen to be a US newspaper employee—is the large-scale outsourcing of advertising department work. People in India can assemble newspaper ads just as well as people here, and "many sources agreed that a back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that metro newspapers can realize a savings of about $500,000 a year when ad production work is offshored."
In India, McKinsey has an office called the McKinsey Knowledge Center. It provides "knowledge management," which I think means having poorly paid Indian college graduates Google information that six-figure McKinsey management consultants are too busy, or lazy, to find themselves. A dispiriting job, from the sounds of it. And yet the offshore oppressed have found a way to celebrate their lot in life with an anthem. Invidiographer Richard Blakeley has mashed it up with a Bollywood clip for a music video. The clip, in my opinion, puts the global transmigration of technology jobs in human terms: The razzle-dazzle sell made to clients and employees, and the crushing existential despair after reality sets in.
Stuff. Indians. Like. Do I really need to do context on this one? Okay, here goes. First there was the blog "Stuff White People Like." And then a bunch of white people were all, "But what kind of white people?" Then the Jews came and they liked stuff too. And more whites came who didn't like anything-not even Mythbusters! Now Indians, from India, have a stuff-we-like blog of their own! Or is this a big ol' racist prank?
Would you like to work for former famous person Elizabeth Hurley (Vanessa Kensington) and her husband, Indian textiles heir Arun Nayar? As long as you don't mind cleaning house twenty hours a day for only a small pile of rupees, you'll absolutely love it. Just ask Violet D'Souza, the couple's former maid (brought from Mumbai by Nayar) who recently accused the couple of making her toil seven days a week for the paltry sum of only $200 (paid, allegedly, in Indian currency.) The case was dropped, though, when a reportedly five figure settlement was reached late yesterday. That's the problem with those girls from deepest Indjuh - once they get a taste for lovely light-skinned life in London, it's all outrageous demands. At least five figures will last her a good three weeks in that most expensive of cities. [P6]
It didn't go well when Yahoo India sacked 40 in Bangalore this week. Employees were given just 30 minutes to clean up and go. The Economic Times reports that "emotionally distraught employees broke down on receiving the news." Then, Yahoo India CEO Sharad Sharma forbade top management from "interfacing" with laid-off employees. Too bad there isn't a Chevy's in Bangalore, eh, Ryan? (Photo by Premshree Pillai)
The suspect Google helped Indian police arrest last fall says he was forced to eat from a bowl he used for a toilet and that he was beaten with a lathi (pictured). A lathi, according to Wikipedia is the primary weapon of Indian Riot Police. It can give "gravely injurious blows" to rioters. "Generally, it leaves many of them crippled." I found that information via Google. Such a helpful company. (Photo by AP/Mahesh Kumar A.)
The majority of New York's timeless manhole covers are made by shoeless workers earning dollars a day in an anachronistic West Bengal, India foundry. The workers, pouring 2,500 degree molten metal into those classic ConEd molds, are usually stripped to the waist and bereft of anything resembling protective gear. New York City's Department of Environmental Protection, naturally responding to the world's increasing flatness, said only that "state law requires the city to buy the lowest-priced products available that fit its specifications," and apparently the Indians undercut their competitors, Fagin's Bedraggled Ragamuffin Concern Ltd. of the UK.
Wow, what a weekend! Pre-Halloween parties, another of those increasingly creepy Daylight Savings fallbacks that you don't even notice because your machines do it for you, and...and I don't have a third thing.
TechGoss is noting a slip-up by News Corp's Austrialian newspaper Telegraph misreported the Australia And New Zealand Banking Group Limited (ANZ) had outsourced its call center to India. ANZ responded with a correction stating it's call center was still Australia, only it's software development was done overseas. Telegraph editors stood by the story, so ANZ decided to make a withdrawal of AUS$5 million dollars in advertising.
A New York Times op-ed points out that while India's touting itself as the new Silicon Valley, at best it's a cheap knockoff. For example, half of India's children are malnourished, and the economy wouldn't reach first-world standards at its current rate of growth until 2106.
