Stone Age Techie

In one of ToastMaster sessions, fellow TM Venkat happened to share his exploits with Smart-Phones and Social-Networking-Websites. Venkat belong to one of those rare breed of techies, who has a fan-following large enough to convince him to do Mobile-Tweeting. During his Project 2 speech, he managed to convince all of us, including me, into believing that we all are living in a networking age : age of Google and Facebook and how its essential to be connected not only to your neighbour or to your friends, but to the entire world !!

But of-late I came across another incident, which surprised me a great deal and forced me to rethink whether Venkat was right.

I happened to invite one of my friend along with his gorgeous wife on dinner. My friend is also from IIT Kharagpur, the same IIT I belong to, and currently holds a plum-post at one of the startups (he doesn't believe in cooling off his heels at big corporations and prefer small companies). Armed with excellent technical skills but somewhat pulled down by below-par communication skills, he is earning as much as anyone else.

During the dinner, we had our usual talks, Bollywood, Cricket, Office Work and all those jazz. I shared with him one of the ugly incidents that recently happened involving my blog (this very blog ;-). He was somewhat surprised to discover that even blogs can create trouble at work place and asked me "Do you blog ??". I said "Yes, I used to do it intermittently, but of-late became a regular at that". To this, he replied "Haan, You work for a big corporation with plenty of free time, so you can afford blogging. Waise bhee Blogging to wahi log karte hain jinke paas bahut sara khali time hoga" (Blogging is mostly done by only those people, who has a lot of spare time at their disposal !!)

I was shocked.I couldn't believe what I just heard. An IIT graduate working in software industry for about 6 years just rejected blogging (the biggest take away from Web 2.0) as merely a time-pass. I asked him "How about those CXOs of  corporations, as big as Google and as small as Cleartrip !! Even they blog. Does that mean they have more spare time than a senior software developer working at a mobile startup ??". There was no answer from my friend, he could have given one, only if he had one !!

I started wondering, how on earth these techies are surviving the test of times ?? But then I realized, may be India's silicon valley doesn't disappoint anyone, not even these stone-age techies :-)