India's Global Reach; Its "Carpe Diem" Moment

From Fortune Magazine's article "India's Global Reach":

Once sheltered from overseas competition by a government fearful of foreign domination, Indian companies now are building global empires with impressive speed, ramping up exports, striking cross-border corporate alliances, snapping up firms in the U.S., Europe, and emerging markets, and attracting billions in foreign portfolio capital to India.

India's largest IT-services companies, which count on foreign customers for more than 90% of sales, remain at the vanguard of India's outward expansion. In little more than a decade, firms like Wipro, Infosys Technologies, and Tata Consultancy Services have evolved from niche players handling basic debugging projects for foreign multinationals into giants in their own right, with operations in every major foreign market, tens of thousands of employees, and equity valuations in the tens of billions of dollars.

From the same issue of Fortune, an article "Google Goes To India":

Google's experiment in replicating its Silicon Valley workplace indulgences and luring back the Indian talent that helped fuel the dot-com boom in the U.S. is a deliberate strategy. This is not outsourcing in the usual sense of seeking cheaper labor. Rather, it's a brain drain in reverse.

Google chose Bangalore in 2004 as the site of its first R&D center outside the U.S., says Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, who heads Google's Asia operations from the company's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, in part "because so many Googlers who are Indian want to move back to India and participate in India's growth."

There may be no Chinese or Russians in these offices. But there is a wide range of diversity nonetheless. These Googlers aren't just Indians. They're Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, and Jains. As the cream of India's talent crop, they speak English, but they also speak Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Telugu, and several more of India's 22 officially recognized languages. "In the U.S., because you live in a fairly segregated society, you have to do something explicit to build diversity," Ram says. "We don't."

MP: It's "Carpe Diem" time in India.