I Won’t Go Onsite…………..

I am a frequenter on the various social networks.
Yesterday, I happened to open my friend list which displays the friend’s name and their location.

Pages after pages were people with locations like Richmond, Akron, London, San Jose, NY, Irving, Sydney, Bonn, Cambridgeshire…….
In fact my resident Indian friends are right now a numeric minority.
There are more friends in Texas than in Tamilnadu!

When I joined TCS after my stint at engineering, the first reaction I got from my mates was “You lucky guy, you will be abroad in no time”.
Yet after almost 8 years of work in the sunshine software sector, my passport has no stamps. I have worked in Trivandrum, Kolkata, Delhi NCR and Indore but never out of India.

The interesting part is, when I say this to any of my colleagues that “I have never been onsite”, I get comments that range from hilarious to outrageous, crazy to disgusting, hurtful to astonished. Here is a small assortment:

“Oh you poor thing, try harder the next time and your manager will surely send you abroad”.
“It is not easy, there are many with no capabilities languishing in India and dreaming about it. You need to put your act together.”
“This is unbelievable….are you telling the truth?”
“Threaten your manager with resignation and ask him/her that only way you stay back is if they send you out.”
Blah…blah….blah…………

Then of course there is the “uncle” kinds; you know the landlords, your fathers’ friends etc – I mean the kind with grey hairs and therefore the bearers of profound wisdom who feel the moral obligation to enthusiastically hard sell their advice to you irrespective of the fact the you have no need for them. They give you even better reactions:
“You know my son ABC, the moment he joined the company XYZ, they realized his potential and he was beseeched to join the workforce at US. I tell you, these multinationals have an eye for talent.” (Which means, you are a complete idiot and such a loser that no one thinks you have any potential).

Yes, I guess I am definitely a loser. Otherwise how do you explain that being in the software business for as long as 8 years, I could never go onsite? Everyone is sure that I regularly have wet dreams of landing at the Heathrow or at JFK with a bag full of rice, dal, papad, pickle, Indian spices, chavanprash etc and a eye full of dreams of getting myself clicked at the Times Square, Niagara Falls, Vegas, Big Ben and put them for public consumption on the social networks.

Social networks are great places for advertising your “oh you know what, I have been there” image with aplomb.
In fact a friend of mine had put a traffic ticket’s scanned image that he had “earned” while driving in Nevada! Beat this for creativity.

At workplace I see so many colleagues squabbling regularly for the coveted onsite posting. Political plottings, cajoling managers, dire threatening, massaging client’s egos, citing amazing and sometimes jaw dropping excuses to earn the prized ticket seems a way of life. Some of the really amazing but true excuses are:

The beseeching the manager kind: “I have a huge loan owing to my sister’s marriage; I need to make some bucks.”
The threatening kind: “I have worked in this project for 2 years; I think it should be me this time or release me.”
The jaw dropping kind: “I am finding marriage proposals turned down for my lack of onsite experience, so……”

So, what is this collective mania of going onsite/abroad which grips almost everyone at our workplaces? Why is it so that going abroad is an “objective” that has to be achieved, rather than it being a natural by product of working in the globalized environs?

I believe, we have this incredible racial notion of considering the fair skinned world a better place which may have been implanted generations before as a result of the indelible hangover of colonial slavery and later on passed on to us. That’s why I see people eager to travel to US, Europe and Australia (all fair skinned worlds) whereas very little interest is available in travelling to say Brazil (which is far ahead of India but of course not as much as say Belgium). Trips to Africa are certainly humiliating, akin to a proud bellicose Delhite’s transfer to Chennai.

This inferiority is so deeply ingrained that when I see the pics posted by many of my friends, I always find them with the known circle of Indian friends. Despite being in a macrocosm of cosmopolitan plurality very few of us seem to inculcate the same in their lifestyle. After all, the must achieve “objective” was to land in the white skinned land, not to mix with them or the least adopt the cosmopolitan outlook.

Yes, I have been a loser; been not clever enough that any management would think that without me functioning from the West the company would just fall apart; been a non-cosmopolitan desi who is too scared to go off limits; and now a sure candidate to be labeled a racist after having written such a blog, but whatever may I seem, I simply don’t want to go onsite.

Let’s end this blog with another real life case. I was getting a transfer from TCS Kolkata to TCS Delhi (which is a big deal mind you, because of the geopolitics). A colleague of mine from TCS Kolkata was onsite. His father met me and gave me an authentic Bengali K C Paul umbrella (FYI, generations in Bengal have shielded themselves from rain using K C Paul’s legendary umbrella) and a sealed tiffin box.
I was supposed to give it to a guy in Delhi who was also supposed to fly to the same location where my friend was. I could never understand the rationale of shipping an umbrella to London (a city where rains are everyday phenomenon) but then I thought may be it was his favorite brand that was not available there. But, guess what was shipped in the sealed tiffin box? His favorite brand of underwear!

Tags: Abroad, Onsite, Passport, Social Network, Software Engineering