Winds of Change!!!

One thing that I used to like about my place of work was the freedom we had.

The freedom to do things your way and the freedom to take a break when you wanted.

So much so that I have been home on almost all alternate months ever since I joined my company.

First it was July. That was Ahmedabad. And then is was Rakshabandhan in August in Faridabad. Then came Dussera in October in Ahmedabad and then Diwali in November in Faridabad. This was followed by Christmas in December in Ahmedabad. Gosh!! 5 times in 9 months!! that is incredible.. but those were the good old days when the Indian economy was booming!

I remember someone coming to our campus and telling us that we are lucky to have been graduating this year when the economy is at an all time high.

Who would have guessed then that the tables could turn so quickly. That in a span of one year it would become impossible for a batch of 120 to be placed! That the golden era of investment banking would come to an end! That the high paying finance jobs would vanish! That we would have multi million corporate scams! That the stock market, being shoved up by the bull would be brought down by the bear! That oil would come down to record low and the dollar rise up! That we would prefer a salary cut than to loose our job! That taking leaves would become such a pain in the A@@.

We had a course in our B-School that questioned the current world order. Sitting there in the classroom we analysed why the World is the way it is! Why US is so strong and Japan is sinking. Why India is not a world power and why it may never become a developed nation! The course taught us how a firm is the centre of an economy, a Private Enterprise Based Market Economy (PEBME) as he called it. How the currency markets were equivalent to a shadow world government! And many of us were the sceptics.

But when I look at it today, I get a flashback of those lectures... With the crash of the i-banks and the bursting of the mortgage bubble the world has changed... The shadow Government has doomed the fate of this current design and a new design is emerging.

The firm is still at the core... the Private Enterprise!! We are now having more stringent corporate governance rules being put in, banks don't go door to door giving you loans... we have seen lot of restructuring within the firms and outside them.. lot of mergers have happened and lot of demergers... At the end of this turmoil only those firms are going to stay alive and kicking who have made their internal processes stronger and the other would die...... Countries like India are beginning to change their outlook towards the growth of the economy.... may be we would learn that it is not the KPOs and the BPOs that are driving us, but it agriculture and capital goods that would make us a sustainable force!!

Though I hardly remember anything what we discussed in those lectures but this thought of a change in the world order always stuck to me...

I am reminded of the last lecture when we had no discussion... but just a song... and how we really felt what we were singing!!

aa chal ke tujhe main le kae chaloon ik aise gagan ke tale.... jahan gam bhi na ho.. aasoon bhi na ho, bas pyaar hi pyaar pale.... ek aise gagan ke tale !!

The whole class reverberated to the tunes of this song..... how each one of us wished that the world would change.. but it would be like this... no-one would have imagined!!