Judging a book by its cover

I'm about to finish my 4 month tenure in India having set up a development office for my company in Pune. Perhaps the most valuable lessons I learned during my time here are:

1. India works differently from the west; heed a local's advice.

This point is perhaps obvious but until I learned it first hand, repeatedly, the extent of this principle was not evident to me.

Case in point: when I arrived in Pune to set up our office I quickly found that most of the talent I wanted was in Bangalore. Our hosting partner company advised me that it is extremely hard to get people to move from Bangalore to Pune and they had been unsuccessful in the past.

I listened to their advice and promptly discounted it for three reasons:
- I felt our US brand was stronger and would be very attractive (and actually it was).
- I had been able to move candidates in the US in the past and so should be able to do so here.
- I could make people move by impressing them with details of the job.

I quickly lined up twelve interviews in just one day of searching, interviewed the eight that showed up the next day and made 2 offers soon after. Both accepted relatively quickly. But, as the time approached for the first one to join, he declined because his family was staunchly against him moving away from his family. And, now, a few weeks before the second is to join there is still a good chance that he may not show up.

The most important lesson out of this experience was that locals who lived and worked in the environment for years did know better than I even if I had a track record of success in the US.

Interestingly, I think my time in India is a microcosm of what will happen to me as my career progresses. Increasingly I will be facing situations where my experience does not directly apply. So to solve the problem I'm going to use some advice my CEO once gave me: Hire Experience. Hire someone who has done it before. Use your judgement and make the final call but don't assume that because you're smart you will arrive at the right answers by yourself always.

2. India is not what it seems on the surface.

If you watch Bollywood movies and read mainstream newspapers like Times Of India you might arrive at the conclusion that I did: Indians have no appreciation for good quality art/music/writing. Most of the above stuff is comparable to trash pop and tabloid journalism respectively. Hindi movies in particular are bizarre. I've noticed that Indian creativity pretty much came to a halt with Michael Jackson's Thriller in 1983. Thereafter, almost every song in Indian movies turned into a group dance with sets & costumes changing every 30 seconds as saris and rain fall from blue skys.

However, imagine if you arrived in the US and listened to Britney Spears on MTV, saw shows like Fear Factor or anything on the Fox network, watched films like Catwoman and read the New York Post. You'd arrive at the conclusion that people in the US are quite uncultured and generally daft. But dig a little deeper and you'll find plenty of good new bands like The Strokes, shows like The Simpsons (the only Fox anomaly), movies like Farenheit 9/11 and periodicals like The New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, Washington Post, etc.

Turns out that India does have high quality work; you just need to know where to look for it. In the case of newspapers read The Hindu for less biased reporting and something closer to journalism. And for better movies and music look at non-Bollywood studios and classical artists respectively.

Mind you, I still think the percentage of crap media in higher in India. Many people use the excuse that the vast uneducated population of India can't appreciate finer writing/dialogue but I believe this is just patronising them. They are human and live life like the rest of us. They can appreciate good art without having to be literate or college educated. A good example was Monsoon Wedding, an intelligent, well-written film that was a huge success in India yet did not feature the usual group dances and out-of-place scenes in Switzerland that are trademarks of Bollywood. The other excuse that I often hear is that Bollywood movies provide for mindless entertainment and are an escape from the harsh realities of India. But escape enough times and you forget reality. More than the entertainment becomes mindless.

Frankly, I think the real reason is that writers/artists have figured out that a garbage script + good looking actors/sets + weak sappy music = rubbish that people will still pay to watch. So long as this model is profitable such crap media will continue to proliferate because it is much more expensive (and/or harder) to write a real script, find actors who don't overact and write lyrically intelligent music.

As a last word on this story, I'll be meeting a childhood friend of mine next week who currently works as an Assistant Director in Bollywood and has worked on blockbuster films such as "Lakshya". I'm curious to see his take on the industry from an insider's point of view. Actually, I'm more curious to see my best friend who I haven't seen in 15 years. My guess - neither he nor I have changed one bit.

Waterloo '98. 21 shots at 21. 

Testing 1, 2, 3....

Just checking to see if my blog site is working.  Ignore please.

(By the way, "Testing 1,2,3" is the name of a song by The BareNaked Ladies, a pop/rock group from Canada.  Good band - witty lyrics and interesting musical style).