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Bangalore Beats Silicon Valley
An anonymous reader writes "The inevitable has happened. Bangalore, which grew under the shadow of America 's Silicon Valley over the last two decades, has finally overtaken its parent. Today, Bangalore stands ahead of Bay Area, San Francisco and California, with a lead of 20,000 techies, while employing a total number of 1.5 lakh engineers."
...a lakh is 100,000.
One entry found for lakh.
Main Entry: lakh
Pronunciation: 'lak, 'lak
Function: noun
Etymology: Hindi lAkh
Date: 1599
1 : one hundred thousand
2 : a great number
- lakh adjective
magic% dict lakh
3 definitions found
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]:
Lac \Lac\, Lakh \Lakh\, n. [Hind. lak, l[=a]kh, l[=a]ksh, Skr.
laksha a mark, sign, lakh.]
One hundred thousand; also, a vaguely great number; as, a lac
of rupees. [Written also {lack}.] [East Indies]
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]:
Lakh \Lakh\, n.
Same as {Lac}, one hundred thousand.
From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:
lakh
n : the cardinal number that is the fifth power of ten [syn: {hundred
thousand}, {100000}]
Dean has often commented on this. One of his main slogans is, "We should be exporting American products, not American jobs." and has often stated that his plan of including workers' rights policies in trade pacts will stem the tide of the unethical offshoring of labor at pennies on the dollar.
You also have to hire some armed guards, at least that is what I saw in a show about the people making money in the Indian film industry.
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
I honestly think that a lot of the current commentators are dead on when they say that this is a "fad" and this will eventually balance itself out. Wait until some corporations get a gut full of having their code halfway across the globe. Most companies aren't willing to let you work at home and yet they're willing to hire hoards of people they'll never meet to write their code? Heh. This will right itself eventually.
You'd better hope so, buddy. Personally I am pretty worried; perhaps I should brush up on my Hindi. Bollywood just beat Hollywood in production and also has announced that it will allow people online to market their products for free whereas Jack Valenti has decided he does not want such help. Now Bangalore has surpassed Silicon Valley in number of jobs but NEVER in cost of living. With even US firms shipping jobs to India like mad, all that is left to light this match is a batch of new Indian software products to compete with US products.
Meanwhile our IP laws mean that it is very undesirable to work on new tech in the US because it will either be shelved, owned by a corporation, or some other company with a patent will make sure you can never do it. But these problems do not exist in India. Neither do they put people in jail for developing crypto software and revere engineering for interoperability. Free Software has no stigma in India and is used where practical unlike in the US where we would rather waste money than do it right.
India is a mixed economy and I've never known an Indian to be afraid of being called a Communist, or for that matter to use the term as a pejorative. Again, collective or community economy is used where practical and private industry is used where it makes more sense. None of this business of endangering the electric power infrastructure in the name of corporate profits.
If there is anything holding India back now, it is government corruption, civil strife, and the struggle with Pakistan. But who knows, maybe they will get that all down to a low simmer so it does not disrupt their blossoming economy. Remember, they only won their independance less than 60 years ago. These things take time.
He may have felt that way but I rather doubt that it's true. I'm building a development team in India and can tell you the following (all below in US $):
1. Wages range from $5 to $10 per hour for developers, senior developers, and architects.
2. Stuff from India is cheap (e.g. maid = $100/month) but foreign stuff is just as expensive as elsewhere. For example, a Compaq computer is still about $1,000. A low-end Toyota is still over $10,000. There is however an India made car that's around $5,000. (Based on Bangalore newpaper ads in December.)
3. A three bedroom tract home in a gated community will still cost about $150,000. The home is nice though with granite floors and counters. (I personally visited such a community outside Bangalore last month.)
The materialistic hope for most IT workers is to simply own their own car. A home and maids are still largely beyond reach.
A maid and a cook is good for you. .. thats 10-20$. If the maid works many hours in 3-4 places, she'll get 60-80$ a month if shes lucky. At this rate, when does her son get schooling, decent college, University etc and become an engineer ?
.. so that when the maid wants 100, and people can afford to give it.
But do you know how much the maid/cook will get paid? In a big city, where wages are higher, you would pay them Rs 500 to 1000
So while the dollar does go further, it doesent do the vast majority of Indians who are farmers, labourers, servants, etc. ANY good.
When will the maids son even think of becoming an engineer and getting his own big house with pool? I think its when wages for everyone go up
As an Indian, I like the fact that many people in US, even well off ones HAVE to do their own laundry, cooking etc. Because that means that there arent a lot of poor people left to become maids/cooks.
I do not know why you say "a big house with a pool". Although I havent counted, I am willing to bet that the number of s/w engineers in India with a house(not apartment) with a pool is way, way less than you imagine. Hell, the number of total pools in India is less that you imagine.
I think your wrong.
Your falling into the trap of thinking that wealth is finite, or at least constrained at its current levels. This is simply not true. The amount of wealth in the world can (and does) grow. In terms of overall 'wealth' (see a good economics text for a description of what exactly wealth is:) ) there is many many times more wealth today than just 100 years ago. The same will likely hold true moving forward (there is likely some limit to how far this can grow, but no economists can even begin to agree on what that limit is).
The point of this is that as India becomes more wealthy, they will begin to contribute more and more in terms of innovation and products back into the overall economy. This will do two very important things. 1) Create new markets for companies (including those in the US). After all, the workers in India will have more wealth and will begin buying more products. 2)Create demand for more services within India itself (once again, more wealth to spread around) which will drive the costs of employment up towards U.S. levels. In the end, the amount of overall wealth has increased, and the amount of wealth within the United States is at worst basically unaffected and more likely actually increased because of the new markets that have been opened up.
There are ways to defeat this. Closed trade policies are the quickest. By adopting protectionist policies the U.S. can effectively isolate itself from these new markets, likewise India could do the same in an effort to protect it's new found wealth. The governments role SHOULD be to protect equal OPPORTUNITIES for trade between India and the U.S. (thus encouraging growth in both countries), rather than attempting to protect the RESULTS of that trade.
This is one case where everyone can hope to win, rather than having exactly 1 winner and a bunch of losers.
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And therefore the money required to make big budget movies is often put in by underworld mafia. Ofcourse this is all covered up and the money is shown as comming from big time industrialists and stock brokers, but even a kid in india knows the real truth.
And when you involve underworld, they want a hugh piece of the pie, and sometimes entire pie. Whenever there is a financial dispute between the producers and director/actors etc. it is often setteled by mafia. Mafia in turn gets (demands) hugh amount of money from the big shots for what it calls protection money.
There have been incidents where rival direcots/actors/music composers have hired the mafia to threaten/beatup or even kill their counter parts.
The history of mafia's association with bollywood is not older than 30 years. Around the 70s time, when bombay (the core of indian movie industry), was the hottest thing for real estate development. There was a lot of money to be had in urbanization and construction builders often used local mafia (small time crooks) for dirty works , such as forecd labour, evicting tenants , suppressing any kind of opposition. etc.
But the maifa was very disorganised back then, and the construction company owners were the ones who called the shots. But soon the indian maifa much like the turn of the century american mafia , organised and turned crime in to a syndicate. This gave rise to some really notorious gangs in bombay and some fierce gang wars.
By mid 80s the , crime syndicate turned their attention to the movie industry (Although they were always associated with bollywood since the 70s). Initially the relationship between the movie industry and maifa was a win-win situation for both, but soon maifa wanted more and more . It got progressively worse in 90s, where there were a lot of incidents of movie people being threatend/shot at by maifa. By then the mafia had shifted its base from bombay to outside of india. But a large supply of unemployed youths in the country ment a continuing domination of the maifa , even when the strings were pulled from outside the country.
Bombay police which were once considered second best only to scotland yard, earned a lot of bad reputaion in this time for their incapability to stop the crime waves. This led to the encounter era, where the police were on a city cleansing mission. Lots of small time gangsters and gang members were arrested, and then shot by the police in a staged escape. Police claimed the culprits were trying to escape while the human rights organisation screamed murder.
Currently it looks like there has been some equilibrium between the maifa , the film industry and the police. Also lot of film makers are shifting away from bombay to other places.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".