Alone At The Gator Park

Until October 2008, Neeraj Sharma, a 30-year-old sales professional, was in an enviable position, working for a big, successful American company. He loved it. Then the carpet got pulled from under his feet. In the following months, one by one, Sharma and most of his colleagues in Delhi were “downsized” by the multinational, which was keeping time to a tanking US economy. To keep his sacking a secret (“I didn’t want my family to worry”), Neeraj packed his bags and took off.

When he returned from travelling across the country, he discovered an entrepreneur budding inside him. “I realised stability and control comes from doing your own thing,” he says. Neeraj is working again, for a large Indian firm this time, but he recently raised enough to invest in a small hotel. Sharma says running it will be the real dream-come-true.

Photograph by Jitender Gupta

“The good part is, I was out of a job and into the next before I ran out of money.”

Subhash Tiwari, 42, Delhi

Tiwari (name changed) is a highly qualified computer professional who found himself “redundant” in ’09. He’s back in the workforce now, having had a little adventure with entrepreneurship. He still thinks about going it alone, from time to time.

This sort of happy medium isn’t a guarantee for everyone out on a limb. Some executives remain jobless for months while others invest fruitlessly in “dream projects”—like Delhi resident Subhash Tiwari, who unsuccessfully bid to become an alternative energy entrepreneur. At 40, Tiwari’s software job fell through, and, in 2009, the highly qualified engineer gave way to a man he had trained. His generous severance package and savings allowed him to pursue an interest in the burgeoning alternative energy field. “The pay-offs promised to be great, and I learned the business well, but the lack of transparency in government contracts was difficult to stomach. It didn’t work out,” he shrugs.

Just before his grip on the golden handshake loosened, Tiwari’s luck turned. Software was back on the growth path, and he was hired. Yet again he is training a younger man to rise through the ranks. “If I don’t make myself redundant, how will I ever move up?” Tiwari says. That’s just how it works.

In city after city, lakhs of Neerajs and Tiwaris were laid off when the slowdown hit in the fall of 2008. Where are they three years down the line, in an environment that continues to be unsettled? Scores continue to enter the ranks of the unemployed, often temporarily, as India’s growing economy is as hungry for talent as it is impatient with them. Meanwhile, the slow US recovery continues to send nris home. India’s own industry is hiring during one quarter, and then sitting tight for two. “Things are far from settled,” says Sunil Goyal, MD, GlobalHunt, an executive search firm.

Still, people laid off over the past three years are hard to come by. It isn’t that they’re not out there—the government estimates five lakh were fired between October-December ’08 alone. It also isn’t that they’ve all found jobs. More often, laid off senior and mid-level executives morph into “consultants”—a calling card that signifies careers in a kind of limbo. Others, less fortunate, are reluctant to be identified because being sacked still has the resonance of being a big life crisis, like the death of a loved one, something to be talked about in whispers.

Younger employees, as always, are quickly getting used to the new realities. According to Debashish Das, chief HR officer at Spanco, a BPO, youngsters unabashedly confess during job interviews that they were asked to leave by a previous employer. Das says, “At times I’m surprised by their candour. ‘What can we do if the company’s products didn’t sell? We did our work...’—they say openly.”

There’s rising insecurity, sure, as talk of a ‘double-dip’ recession takes hold. It’s worsened by the absence of social security for the unemployed. Asha Bhandarker, professor at Management Development Institute, describes another reason, a “dichotomy” that has taken root in today’s workplace, in the IT industry in particular. First, the responsibility to manage one’s career has shifted from the firm to the individual. And second, senior executives are expected to “groom young entrants and then face the real danger of losing one’s job (to them)”.

The tendency is making companies and industries agile and youthful, and yet short-sighted. More significant, some say, is how urban Indian professionals are reconciling to these changes, knowing they are inevitable. “You see a little more of small-is-beautiful and little less of living it up,” says Mumbai psychiatrist Dr Harish Shetty. You also see young job-seekers have developed a “transactional approach” to work. They seek higher paying jobs from the get-go, quit before being sacked, don’t easily settle, and are ready to switch careers. A survey Bhandarker co-conducted recently found that younger employees “look for job quality only after they have accumulated a decent nest egg”.

“Career choices today are no longer about long-term, permanent commitments but an expression of current interests and aspirations,” agrees Basudev Mukherjee, MD, Indian Staffing Federation. Lack of stability seems to be another growing shortcoming. “Today there are companies in India with either very senior executives or very junior ones,” says Bhandarker.

Das, of Spanco, which has offices in Delhi, Mumbai and smaller towns like Coimbatore and Dehradun, says a “cataclysmic” event like getting sacked often leads people to introspect, regardless of location, often forcing them to try and re-do whatever magic worked in a previous assignment. That explains why people unsuccessful in one firm sometimes move on to immediate success at their next venture.

Take Sohrab Jassawala, 29, a Mumbai-based freelance tour guide. He has taken the management of his career into his own hands after his regular job petered out in ’09. Jassawala stayed on in tourism because he loved to travel. Going independent means he can no longer be let go of, but it also means longer hours and new roles—such as finding/handling clients. “I try to do as much as possible when I have work coming in. A freelancer’s income isn’t stable. There could be a long slow period,” he says. Sometimes, he says, he feels like he works 24/7.

(Photograph by Jitender Gupta)

“I could do tours again, but this is what I want... caring for animals.”

Nariman Vazifdar, 29, Mumbai

Vazifdar was happy as a tour guide, dragging foreigners across the mountains of Nepal and rivers of Bengal. But then, his employers were taken over by a larger firm as “consolidation” hit the travel business after 2008. Soon, work completely dried up. Still, he’s happier now stomping and sloshing through marshes netting reptiles for conservation, his passion. A PhD is on the cards..

Then you have Mumbai’s Nariman Vazifdar, who was 26 when the downturn blazed a trail through the tourism industry, taking few prisoners. His employers—Vazifdar led tours of foreign travellers through the north and west for ‘Imaginative Traveler’—were soon taken over by a larger firm as “consolidation” hit the business. “At first, the number of tours I was assigned reduced, then work really dwindled, finally it just stopped,” he says. It was time to take stock.

Vazifdar made a beeline for the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust. Here, for a year, he fed the animals, measured them, kept records; and taught visitors reptile conservation. His income dipped, but he is now bashing on towards a PhD in conservation. A lot depends on finding the money to study abroad, for which the sizeable student loans will be a worry. Working in India is out of the question, but he’s resolute: “I need work that won’t force me to change, like a corporate job, and I want to work with my passion, animal conservation. I could go back to taking tours, but I don’t want to,” he says.

At least he’s not over 45. At that age, work options are increasingly limited, and people would rather not move than risk failing. With the whole world on a merry-go-round of hiring and firing, it’s no wonder people are scouring their pockets for “passions” to monetise. Others prepare to jump on the next alternative career at the hint of a pink slip. That’s how the entrepreneurial spirit is probably unleashed. Either way, something has changed, permanently, for the survivors of the slowdown.