The Gleaming IT Profession in India

Do you want to learn and grow in the organisation you work in from a fresher to a high managerial level? Do you want to balance work and home together without sacrificing much? Do you wish to lead a healthy life and make ever-lasting friends at your work place? If the answer to all these questions is ‘Yes’ then the IT industry is not the place for you to look for employment.

These days it has become quite a norm for people in the IT industry to change jobs every year. They find that the only way to increase their salary is changing a job and asking for a phenomenal jump in the salary. This is also a consequence of a bad appraisal system in such organizations. When a person joins an organization, he is told that the company has one of the best and fair appraisal systems in the industry. But when the person goes through his first appraisal he gets to know that the big promises made to him at the beginning were just an eye wash. No matter what he does, he will never be able to get a hike he deserves. The appraiser is instructed by the higher management to appraise the people in his team in such a way that one person gets an excellent grade, two people get a good grade and the rest of them get an average grade. He is also allowed to give a poor grade to the person who he dislikes and who he thinks is incapable of contributing much to the project and to the organization on the whole.

As a result of an increase in the attrition rate, the trust and loyalty that used to exist between an employer and employee has come to an end. Nowadays, the employee is least bothered about the loss the company faces because of his resignation. The companies have also stopped caring for their employees. They don’t bother whether the employees have been put into projects keeping in mind their interest and capability. They just place them in the project which they think would fetch them the highest monetary benefit from the client. They don’t bother about their personal and organizational growth. They refuse to stretch and accommodate a personal request. Both the employer and the employee think about their monetary benefit. The company squeezes out as much work as it can from its employees and the employees also try to negotiate a phenomenal hike when joining.

Because of such a huge demand for professionals in the Indian IT industry today, companies find it easier and cheaper to recruit freshers. They prefer training them according to their own needs rather than employing someone who is experienced and who asks for a big pay. They pay peanuts to these freshers on the pretext of their being inexperienced but make them work as hard as experienced employees. On the other hand, if an experience employee comes on board, he is pushed into doing the same work as a guy with half his experience. He is put under a team leader who is younger than him and has nearly half the experience but is in the current organization for two or more years. The experienced person then gets frustrated due to the immature way in which the work is handled and is forced to either take up some other project outside his interest or look for greener pastures again.

In BPO or ITES companies catering to foreign clients, it is assumed that the employee is ready to work in any shift the company puts him in. While UK timings are still reasonable, USA timings extend up to wee hours of the day. If there is a meeting or a deadline, the employee who comes to the office at 9 in the morning is expected to stay back even beyond midnight. There is no consideration whether the employee is a male or a female. Everyone is expected to stay back to finish work and then leave. If the company issues a laptop to the employee or he has a computer at home, he still has some relief of finishing the work from home. If this isn’t enough, generally there is no healthy snack or meal available in these offices. In order to finish work fast and rush home, the employee is forced to either skip meals or have a high calorie snack which has little nutrition at office. This leads to obesity and lifestyle induced diseases.

In today’s expensive economy, to maintain a decent lifestyle and save something for the future, both spouses have to work. Sometimes it is seen that due to stress at office the relationship between them also starts getting sour since they hardly get any time for each other. On weekends they have other household and important chores to attend so they get very little time to enjoy each other’s company. They also get cut off from their extended family and friend circle and end up only making courtesy calls to them once in a blue moon.

In some cases, where both the partners are in late thirties, it gets difficult for them to conceive due to stress and unhealthy lifestyle. Another problem area is when women have to join work just after having children. They have to leave back their toddlers in some other family member’s care or sometimes even with a maid to join back work. Sometimes, this choice is made due to the family’s financial problems. But, when this choice is made due to over ambition of women, it is not worth it as at such a tender age the child is deprived of its mothers care. The mother also feels guilty as it always plays that the back of her mind that she is not spending enough time with her kid. When she returns home from work she is very tired. After doing the household chores, she is left with very little energy to play with the kid.
Thus, only bachelors who have ample amount of time and energy can survive working in such organisations which demand an awfully high level of commitment without offering much to their employees. Just out of college, bachelors are more than happy to get jobs in companies with good reputation. They take up these jobs for work experience and get a good jump in their next employment. As they still live with their parents or with roommates, their expenses are next to nothing. So they take up these jobs even if they are paid peanuts. But for people who have families to sustain it’s a different story.

Do Ghosts and Spirits Exist?

I recently came cross an interesting psychic website that claimed to have an interactive soul’s engine. It said that it practiced virtual tarot and could predict things about a person’s life. The person had to type a question and request the ghost to answer it. It seemed pretty unbelievable but I still decided to try it long with the friend who introduced the website to me. I tried asking question after question but the ghost didn’t answer any of them. It either said that it will answer my question later or that I should stop testing it. Then my friend said that the ghost only interacts with a few people and he was one of the people whose questions it answers. He then started asking questions about my life and the ghost gave correct replies. After testing the website for sometime, when I had just started believing him, my friend revealed the trick behind the website to me.

Here is the trick. When a person typed the request to the ghost, say, “Good spirit, (followed by a dot) please answer my question”, he actually typed in the answer to the question about to be asked after the dot. The answer would then be displayed in the ghost’s answer field. The request field on the website was designed in such a way that no matter what the person typed after the dot, the sentence ‘please answer my question’ would appear on the screen, in place of the answer the person typed. Thus, the other person was tricked into believing that the ghost was answering its questions correctly.

Existence of ghosts and spirits is one of the most debatable topics. There are some people who staunchly believe in their existence, while some claim that no matter how many times they have visited haunted places they have not come across any ghosts.

A television show which I recently saw invited a famous sage, a ghost hunter, a religious expert, and a ghost believer. All four of them presented their ideas on the subject. The sage said that he believed in the existence of soul and reincarnation but didn’t believe in ghosts. The ghost hunter said that till date he has visited many haunted places but has never come across any ghosts or spirits. The religious expert said that people who meet an untimely death or who die before their wishes are fulfilled in this lifetime turn into ghosts. He said that he has seen incidents where religious practices performed at haunted places have helped in freeing the ghosts and cleansing the place. The ghost believer also seconded this and said that an incident happened in his family which made him a believer. An ailing family member was taken to a psychic who detected that his son was possessed by an evil spirit who was in turn ruining his health. Some religious rite was then performed to get rid of the evil spirit.

A very famous international science and geographic channel showcases some of the so-called real life stories related to ghosts and spirits. They show dramatic reconstructions of what actually happened and how the situation was then dealt with. They interview people whose houses were once haunted and weave these interviews in between the dramatic reconstructions, thus making the story look believable. In these stories people narrate how they came across ghosts and spirits in their houses and how they got rid of them with the help of psychics.

There are some other channels which thrive on such ghost stories which have been blown out of proportion. They show spicy advertisements promoting these stories and get viewers interested in them. They interview psychics and get them to perform controversial and rarely seen religious practices. They show psychics performing religious rites on people thought to be possessed by evil spirit. They also show ascetics who meditate in burning ghats, next to nearly charred dead bodies, eating their remains and meditating in order to get special powers from the devil.

Some channels have regular programmes in which they send their reporters to famous haunted places to try to prove that ghost only exist in the century-old stories related to such places and not in reality. Sometimes, they also send psychic’s to visit such places. These psychics meditate on spot and narrate the incidents which they visualise. Sometimes these psychics come up with stories or scenes of violence committed in such places due to which the souls of the tortured people haunt these places.

The film industry is also not far from showing all kind of stories regarding ghosts, sprits and reincarnations. Movies have been made suggesting various things about them. Some of the famous myths are that ghosts’ existence can be determined by placing a holy lemon in the haunted place and seeing if changes colour after some time. They profess that ghosts cannot be seen in a mirror and ghost’s feet are turned outwards.

Thus, as audience it is up to us to judge whether these stories shown on television, movies and various other media are true. We have to use our own discretion and religious faith to decide whether to believe in the existence of ghosts and spirits or not.

Finally, no lack of scientific proof has stopped a man from believing in God and none can stop him from believing in ghosts and spirits.