Indian friends and colleagues in Rajasthan inspired me to found Teachers Without Borders, whose mission is to close the education divide by providing services and programs in Community Teaching & Learning Centers.

Congratulations, Mr. Bhandari, for your vision and commitment. -Dr. Fred Mednick

Programmer Salaries

I am sick and tired of the same “mantra” sung by you about Indian programmers being paid one fifth of what their U.S. counter parts get paid.

Do you know what it costs to live in India as a percentage of earnings? Do you realize the uncertainty associated with living here? Do you understand the challenges, work ethic, culture, and lifestyle adjustment?

Is the price of siliconindia the same in U.S. and India? Do you pay the same salaries to your reporters ? If not, why not? Why are you limiting it to engineers? Talk about doctors, journalists, even garbage pickers. There is plenty of opportunity for Indian body shoppers to replace every worker in the U.S. From a salary perspective, over 90% of the jobs can be performed by people from foreign countries.

So, go ahead, woo the body shopping industry to do everything from cleaning the streets to managing IT for large organizations. -Anand Deshpande

Sales Reality

Srikumar Rao’s article “Do You Trust a Salesperson?” (siliconindia September 2001) basically implies that all salespeople are essentially like used car salesman with the
tactics they employ (using manipulation and deceit just to get a short-term sale when it may not be the best interest of the client to buy). This implication is misleading at best and outright wrong at worst.

Given that sales and marketing efforts often go hand-in-hand, different industries have different roles for “salespeople” more than your article implies. For example, a huge corporation such as Intel has “technical marketing” engineers who basically interface between OEMs and company engineers with the intent of getting OEMs to eventually buy certain chipsets or other technological “solutions.” The jobs of these people is basically to create a message, send it out to the world, receive feedback, and massage the message until the desired response is achieved (usually a sale). This is a far cry from the narrow-angled example of telemarketing that Mr. Rao gives, which is only one very small aspect of salesmanship.

Sales is about convincing people to buy through various verbal and non-verbal means. This may or may not involve various degrees of manipulation. (I like to think of the manipulation aspect of sales as a subset of the “convincing” aspect of sales).

Mr. Rao’s articles in the past about getting white papers distributed to help build credibility were excellent, but I feel he fell way short this month. -Aditya

The Network Effect

In recent weeks I had the occasion to attend a couple of siliconindia events – “The New Face of IT Services”, in Iselin, New Jersey in July and a recent Tech Factory West — “Enterprise Software: The Roadmap to Corporate America” in Palo Alto, Calif. Attending these events gave me a new perception of siliconindia and its ‘Network Effect’ – how the enormously useful content we read in the magazine and on the Web site, becomes ‘live’ and interactive, and the attendee is surrounded by people who tackle similar business and technology issues, but have different ways of addressing them. This leads to sharing of information and business strategy at the highest level. The few hours I have spent at your events have provided me more contacts and direction than anything else.

Although you have innovated quite a bit on the events platform, there is still a lot left to be desired. I wish the networking sessions were longer and more formal. The sessions should have a focus on ways maturing Indian IT companies can integrate with the mainstream. Also, attempts should be made towards formal mentoring, with senior executives of Indian origin making extra efforts to help fellow Indian professionals and their companies. The discussion often gets narrowly focused on opportunities in the US and India. The horizon should be broadened to include other countries and regions of the world where there are opportunities waiting to be tapped. Specially because your conferences attract attendees from other parts of the world, and a formal agenda to engage them will make sense. Otherwise, keep the topics very focused, and don’t let the moderators and speakers stray into side topics that appeal to them, as has often been the case.

Keep the good work going, and I look forward to attending your Annual Conference that is coming up soon. - Thomas Ramakrishnan