[Reader-list] Heather Timmons: A reverse culture shock in India

[Patrice Riemens]

Original to the NYT/IHT, Nov 27, 2009.
Original at: http://bit.ly/6YIqFG



Some Indians Find It Tough to Go Home Again
By HEATHER TIMMONS

NEW DELHI — When 7-year-old Shiva Ayyadurai left Mumbai with his family
nearly 40 years ago, he promised himself he would return to India someday
to help his country.

In June, Mr. Ayyadurai, now 45, moved from Boston to New Delhi hoping to
make good on that promise. An entrepreneur and lecturer at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a fistful of American degrees,
he was the first recruit of an ambitious government program to lure
talented scientists of the so-called desi diaspora back to their homeland.

“It seemed perfect,” he said recently of the job opportunity.

It wasn’t.

As Mr. Ayyadurai sees it now, his Western business education met India’s
notoriously inefficient, opaque government, and things went downhill from
there. Within weeks, he and his boss were at loggerheads. Last month, his
job offer was withdrawn. Mr. Ayyadurai has moved back to Boston.

In recent years, Mother India has welcomed back tens of thousands of
former emigrants and their offspring. When he visited the United States
this week, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh personally extended an invitation
“to all Indian-Americans and nonresident Indians who wish to return home.”
But, like Mr. Ayyadurai, many Indians who spent most of their lives in
North America and Europe are finding they can’t go home again.

About 100,000 “returnees” will move from the United States to India in the
next five years, estimates Vivek Wadhwa, a research associate at Harvard
University who has studied the topic. These repats, as they are known, are
drawn by India’s booming economic growth, the chance to wrestle with
complex problems and the opportunity to learn more about their heritage.
They are joining multinational companies, starting new businesses and even
becoming part of India’s sleepy government bureaucracy.

But a study by Mr. Wadhwa and other academics found that 34 percent of
repats found it difficult to return to India — compared to just 13 percent
of Indian immigrants who found it difficult to settle in the United
States. The repats complained about traffic, lack of infrastructure,
bureaucracy and pollution.

For many returnees the cultural ties and chance to do good that drew them
back are overshadowed by workplace cultures that feel unexpectedly
foreign, and can be frustrating. Sometimes returnees discover that they
share more in their attitudes and perspectives with other Americans or
with the British than with other Indians. Some stay just a few months,
some return to the West after a few years.

Returnees run into trouble when they “look Indian but think American,”
said Anjali Bansal, managing partner in India for Spencer Stuart, the
global executive search firm. People expect them to know the country
because of how they look, but they may not be familiar with the way things
run, she said. Similarly, when things don’t operate the way they do in the
United States or Britain, the repats sometimes complain.

“India can seem to have a fairly ambiguous and chaotic way of working, but
it works,” Ms. Bansal said. “I’ve heard people say things like ‘It is so
inefficient or it is so unprofessional.’ ” She said it was more
constructive to just accept customs as being different.

Sometimes, the better fit for a job in India is an expatriate who has
experience working in emerging markets, rather than someone born in India
who has only worked in the United States, she said.

While several Indian-origin authors have penned soul-searching tomes about
their return to India, and dozens of business books exist for Western
expatriates trying to do business here, the guidelines for the returning
Indian manager or entrepreneur are still being drawn.

“Some very simple practices that you often take for granted, such as being
ethical in day to day situations, or believing in the rule of law in
everyday behavior, are surprisingly absent in many situations,” said Raju
Narisetti, who was born in Hyderabad and returned to India in 2006 to
found a business newspaper called Mint, which is now the country’s
second-biggest business paper by readership.

He said he left earlier than he expected because of a “troubling nexus” of
business, politics and publishing that he called “draining on body and
soul.” He returned to the United States this year to join The Washington
Post.

There are no shortcuts to spending lots of time working in the country,
returnees say. “There are so many things that are tricky about doing
business in India that it takes years to figure it out,” said Sanjay
Kamlani, the co-chief executive of Pangea3, a legal outsourcing firm with
offices in New York and Mumbai. Mr. Kamlani was born in Miami, where his
parents emigrated from Mumbai, but he has started two businesses with
Indian operations.

When Mr. Kamlani started hiring in India, he met with a completely
unexpected phenomena: some new recruits would not show up for work on
their first day. Then, their mothers would call and say they were sick for
days in a row. They never intended to come at all, he realized, but
“there’s a cultural desire to avoid confrontation,” he said.

The case of Mr. Ayyadurai, the M.I.T. lecturer, illustrates just how
frustrating the experience can be for someone schooled in more direct,
American-style management. After a long meeting with a top bureaucrat, who
gave him a handwritten job offer, Mr. Ayyadurai signed on to the Council
of Scientific and Industrial Research, or C.S.I.R., a government-financed
agency that reports to the ministry of science.

The agency is responsible for creating a new company, called
C.S.I.R.-Tech, to spin off profitable businesses from India’s dozens of
public laboratories. Currently, the agency, which oversees 4,500
scientists, generates just $80 million in cash flow a year, even though
its annual budget is the equivalent of half a billion dollars.

Mr. Ayyadurai said he spent weeks trying to get answers and responses to
e-mail messages, particularly from the person who hired him, the C.S.I.R.
director general, Samir K. Brahmachari. After several months of trying to
set up a business plan for the new company with no input from his boss, he
said, he distributed a draft plan to C.S.I.R.’s scientists asking for
feedback, and criticizing the agency’s management.

Four days later, Mr. Ayyadurai was forbidden from communicating with other
scientists. Later, he received an official letter saying his job offer was
withdrawn.

The complaints in Mr. Ayyadurai’s paper could be an outline for what many
inside and outside India say could be improved in some workplaces here:
disorganization, intimidation, a culture where top directors’ decisions
are rarely challenged and a lack of respect for promptness that means
meetings start hours late and sometimes go on for hours with no clear
agenda.

But going public with such accusations is highly unusual. Mr. Ayyadurai
circulated his paper not just to the agency’s scientists but to
journalists, and wrote about his situation to Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh. India is “sitting on a huge opportunity” to create new businesses
and tap into thousands of science and technology experts, Mr. Ayyadurai
said, but a “feudal culture” is holding the country back.

Mr. Brahmachari said in an interview that Mr. Ayyadurai had misunderstood
nearly everything — from his handwritten job offer, which he said was only
meant to suggest what Mr. Ayyadurai could receive were he to be hired, to
the way Mr. Ayyadurai asked scientists for their feedback on what the
C.S.I.R. spinoff should look like.

To prove his point, Mr. Brahmachari, who was two hours late for an
interview scheduled by his office, read from a government guide about
decision-making in the organization. Mr. Ayyadurai didn’t follow protocol,
he said. “As long as your language is positive for the organization I have
no problem,” he added.

As the interview was closing, Mr. Brahmachari questioned why anyone would
be interested in the situation, and then said he would complain to a
reporter’s bosses in New York if she continued to pursue the story.