India (40 page)

Mack lives in California. When the sun rises over the Golden Gate, he throws on a pair of Levi’s and an Old Navy top, or maybe a T-shirt from the pile of free ones he has with “Yahoo!” or a geeky conference logo on the front. Silicon Valley was once filled with fruit orchards but is now famous as the home of innumerable tech companies; compared to many parts of the U.S. it is wealthy, ethnically diverse and liberal. Mack grabs some bites of breakfast, scoops up his iPhone and the keys to his Acura TL and says goodbye to his wife and son at the door of their three-bedroom apartment. On the way to work, he drops his daughter at her school in Santa Clara and
has a fifteen-minute drive past shopping malls, banks and software companies until he reaches the Yahoo! headquarters at Sunnyvale.

While his system starts up, he heads for the pantry to wash his teacup and fill his water bottle. What he does at the moment he sits down at his work station is significant—will he check email, log on to Facebook, update his status, Twitter?—because Mack’s job is to catch us at this precise instant in our day. He oversees the Yahoo! front door, the homepage, and with 300 million people visiting daily, he has to understand our “check-in” behaviour better than we do. What is to stop us from spending a few minutes on the site answering email, and then wandering off elsewhere? Mack has a team of ten working with him, people from China, India, Korea—even some from the United States. He specializes in ideation, in coming up with the ideas that will make Yahoo!’s website more attractive than its competitors.

Come lunchtime, he heads for the cafeteria to have salad or world food; Italian, Lebanese, Japanese, whatever they are serving that day. He returns to his work station, but he has been working all the while on his iPhone. “Wife and mother-in-law go Vegas, in charge of kids for next two days,” he tweets. So far, so American; but Mack comes from Bangalore.

He was born in 1975 to what he calls a middle-class family. In those days, middle-class Indian families had few consumer goods, no holidays and no slack. Every rupee counted, but it did not feel like deprivation because everybody else had little too. “Things were pretty different at that time,” Mack said. “We didn’t have big plans. I took a degree at Bangalore University in fine arts, photography and advertising. I wasn’t very good at studies compared to the others. I enjoyed painting and photography, and I was influenced by Kannada literature and the Russians—Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy—and artists like Picasso and Gauguin.” His family was unusual: the emphasis was more on creativity than on hard study, and his father was the devoted editor of a little bi-monthly magazine in Kannada. “We would have discussions about poetry, politics, literature, art. My father used to ask us to read out things from the newspapers, very loud. We had a noticeboard where I would put paintings. But if you talk to other people like me, you’ll find they spent most of their evenings at engineering coaching classes.

“In 1996 I did an interview with a company. My mother said I should do computers. The offer of being able to use a PC was important, as there was no way we could have afforded one at home. I took the job because it gave me the chance to scan images—I wanted to be an illustrator. Within a year, I was in front of a computer 24/7. I was fascinated by the software. I started using everything, Adobe Photoshop, 3D Studio Max. All the software was
freely available in India as it was pirated, and I could begin practising on it in a way that people in the U.S. couldn’t at the time. Without pirated software you would never, ever have had so many geeks from India.

“In 2000 I moved away from software towards web development and began working for a U.S. company in Bangalore. They gave me the opportunity to move to San Jose [in California] and I was put in charge of some areas of their user interface. It was my first time abroad. I had to adapt to new ways of living. I was feeling insecure. Although my parents are veg, I was not, but I felt a bit of guilt about eating beef. We went to a hamburger joint and I ate some almost by accident. When I told my father, he asked whether I had enjoyed it and when I said yes, his answer was, ‘Well that’s OK, but don’t tell your mother.’ Then I started tasting other meats too.

“The way a U.S. company worked was very different, and surprising to me. They said, ‘OK, see what you can make,’ and offered me stock options, which wouldn’t have happened in an Indian company. My English was not that polished. It was hard to converse. Kannada was my first language, the language I used at home. Other young programmers and designers from India, Brazil, Pakistan, Israel felt the same way, but we knew people were not looking at our English, but at what we could do. So some things were pardoned. My role was very critical for the company. I was trying to tame the engineering problems with the interface—and everyone uses the interface! It was hard to communicate to the Americans why I was taking a decision. I had to draw ideas on a whiteboard to explain exactly why. In the end I stopped doing that and learned the correct terms for things I knew instinctively, web-world phrases they would understand like ‘heuristic evaluation’ and ‘user-centred design.’

“In the Bay Area there were quite a lot of Indian stores, Indian newspapers, Bollywood films. I met a lot of south Indian engineers at first, but then I thought I needed to be a little more active. I met doctors, African-Americans, writers, Mexicans, journalists. It was a new world for me. I realized then that not everybody in America was rich, and the blue-collar workers can have a tough time. In 2003 I lost my job and returned to Bangalore, where I met my wife. She’s an embedded-systems engineer, from a similar background to me. When I returned to the U.S. in 2006 I knew I only wanted to work for a big company, because I needed more security now I was married. I went to Yahoo! to establish products for them, and now I focus on ideation, on ideas. The very first thing you see on the Yahoo! homepage is me.”

It was, historically, an extraordinary cultural migration for a young
Kannada-speaker to have made, but in an interlinked and rapidly altering world, Mack’s alien background was no disadvantage. His upbringing in middle-class 1980s Bangalore gave him a talent that dovetailed with the needs of contemporary America. His family or home life in California, eating south Indian dishes like upma, idli and sambar for breakfast with his wife before driving to Sunnyvale in his Acura TL, reflected his global position.

“The first thing I did when I got this role was to commission ethnographic studies—in the U.S., in India, in Brazil. What is your check-in routine? How do you use the Internet at different times of day? It varies in each country or society. In the early morning it might be emails or social networks, at noon you might be more relaxed and looking at links, in the evening your behaviour has completely changed. Our ideation team has to capture all these different behaviours and build designs around them. So now you see lots more non-Yahoo! properties on the homepage. You can add your own links to sports, a newspaper, whatever sites you visit. You can check Facebook or eBay through your homepage. We are pushing it on to mobiles too. I am working to embed Yahoo! applications on televisions, so that when you’re watching TV you can project what’s on your handheld on to the screen. You can chat about the game or whatever a politician is saying in his speech, you can look at photos or check emails on the side of the TV. We always work on the principle that an idea will be possible. We say: ‘Don’t worry if it can’t be done. The technology will follow.’ ”

From the way Mack spoke, it seemed as if his angle on the world, which grew out of his Indian cultural background, was a perfect fit with Silicon Valley.

“My favourite inspirational quote is: ‘When you come to a roadblock, take a detour.’ I feel involved in the cultural life here. I always ask a lot of questions. I am asked to speak about my work as a designer. In some ways, we would live a more sophisticated life in Bangalore. You can have a driver and a nanny there, which is hard to afford in the U.S. I find some people here lead very simple lives. They don’t have much money, they are conservative, they’ve never been outside California. I’ve noticed the Indians here become a lot more conservative too. They start going to Hindu temples, which they would never have done at home, and attending community stuff and south Indian cultural events. They say things to me like, ‘Mmm, you have a daughter, you need to be careful.’ Once their kids hit their teens, they want to get them out of America. There was a big fuss when some children came home from a playground saying, ‘Papa, can I see the Last
Supper painting?’ A Christian organization had been doing a playground puppet show, featuring famous religious pictures. People were very angry about it. I wasn’t bothered, I was like, ‘Sure, let them look at the painting.’ I think every experience is worth having. But our future will be in India. In three or four years, we will return to Bangalore.”
²²

Ramappa had managed the move from the village to the city. A short, composed man, he grew up in the 1940s on land close to what is now Bangalore airport. A few years younger than Venkatesh, he otherwise had a similar background: his father and uncles were day-wage labourers who were paid in rice or ragi (millet) according to a local barter system. His parents owned nothing but a thatched hut, and could not afford to raise cattle. They were Raju Kshatriyas, which in this regional setting meant they had inferior status. In north India, the Kshatriyas were a powerful group, traditionally part of the warrior caste, but here they had little. Only three families in the village came from the Raju Kshatriya community, while nearly all of their neighbours were Gowdas, who owned land. Like Venkatesh, Ramappa was near the bottom of the pile, but not as low as the Dalits, who lived in a kheri, or lane, of their own, away from the other houses. He could reasonably have expected to pass his entire life as a landless day-wage labourer.

Ramappa did something extraordinary as a child: he enrolled himself at a nearby primary school. His parents thought this was an odd thing to do, but were not concerned as they had the traditional Hindu respect for learning, and he was too young to work properly in the fields. The difficulty came when he wanted to go to secondary school, encouraged by a teacher, and his parents refused. Who would pay the fees? It would mean a ten-mile walk each day, five miles there and five miles back. Ramappa held a trump card: the school would waive the fees because he had been recommended as a good student. Since he was an only child, his father needed his labour, and a battle began as Ramappa tramped doggedly to school each day.

At sixteen he passed his SSLC, the Secondary School Leaving Certificate, and wished to go to college. His parents refused, absolutely. So he did something rash, and in retrospect out of character: he stole money from a stall where his father sold bananas and paan—betel leaf parcels of areca nut paste and slaked lime, for chewing. Then he travelled to the big city and enrolled for a bachelor’s degree in commerce. It was the early 1960s.

Would he make it? Bangalore was a cacophony, and everything was new. It seemed to be packed with busy people and motor vehicles, though
in fact it was a well-planned city with market gardens, parks, water tanks and shrines. The population was growing rapidly and new buildings were starting to spread across the stretches of green, displacing the shimmering champak and gulmohar trees. Until now Ramappa had gone barefoot. He realized he would have to learn how to wear shoes or chappals. What else would he need to discover? He reached a cousin’s house and stayed there until his father and uncle caught up with him. After an epic family argument which he still does not like to discuss—after all, he was a thief and a disloyal son—it was decided Ramappa would not be forced to come home. For a monthly rent of Rs25 he took a room lined with asbestos sheets which had enough space for a bed and a secondhand Phillips bicycle, on which he could cycle to college.

“I took my meals there,” he remembered. “I had a small kerosene stove. There was no bathroom. I was almost sleeping under my bicycle.” He spoke in English in a strong regional accent, a “y” sound stuck to words which started with a vowel, “Y-I” for “I.” This sort of life, renting a space so small there was barely space to sleep, was common enough among people who moved to cities in an effort to better themselves. In the classifieds section of newspapers in Pune in Maharashtra, you could still find “cotbasis” adverts—meaning you rented a bed to sleep in for a certain number of hours, and nothing more: “Available accommodation for day shift working women/girls on cotbasis near Rajiv Gandhi IT park Hinjawadi, call …”

The take-off point for Ramappa, the moment at which his studious dreams developed a real chance of succeeding, was when he was talent-spotted by the Raju Kshatriyas of Bangalore. This was probably the single most important factor in determining his destiny, and matches the experience of other unlikely achievers of his generation across India. In the state of Mysore (now Karnataka), the Raju Kshatriya community was a minority with few graduates and no representation in politics. Some had joined government service, and a few were starting to make money as small industrialists or contractors. They wanted to advance, collectively. So Ramappa, a bright boy from a rural background, was considered worthy of assistance. He was given a free room in the house of a community leader and became the secretary of a students’ support association calling itself the Raju Kshatriya Hari-Hara Sangha (Hari-Hara being a combined form of the deities Vishnu and Shiva, implying they were not sectarian). He was helped too by a local custom called “varaana,” which has now almost disappeared, whereby more prosperous households would offer a regular weekly or daily meal to young students who were getting started in the world.

So in a larger context, Ramappa had three significant advantages over Venkatesh: he grew up on land that produced food, he was clever and motivated, and he came from an extended caste community that was able to help him once he reached the city.

His struggle was by no means over. Ramappa qualified as a lawyer and joined an office as a junior. “I had no income. I soon realized that unless you came from a lawyer or judge’s family, you got no briefs. Most advocates were Lingayats [a small but powerful caste] or Brahmins. I realized that mere intelligence did not count in this profession. So I opened an office and put out a sign: ‘M. S. Ramappa, Advocate, LLB, LLM.’ I was scarcely able to make both ends meet. I struggled for ten or twelve years. I would have become a judge—I have no doubt—if I hailed from a majority community. But everything works on a patronage basis, and you need backing from local politicians. So for years I was struggling away until, in 1975, I decided to become a lecturer. I was given a readership in mercantile law at a government college. My wife was earning a reasonable salary as a teacher. She was from an educated family in our community, and since I was hell-bent on studying and doing well, her parents had been happy for us to marry. Without the support of my in-laws, things would have been hard. We lived in their small house, and by the 1980s I had a part-time professorship at the university, teaching mercantile, company and insurance law.”