Has Bollywood cast its spell on IT world?

Everybody is talking about Lagaan these days. Well, now that
it is a hit, Aamir Khan can relax a bit and our cricketers can do so as well.
Despite the bad publicity received by cricket, it still holds away over the
masses of this country. So can you now guess who must have been the most worried
man when cricket was getting all that bad press? Aamir Khan. Of course!

But Lagaan is not really about cricket. It is about making
something you believe in. It is about working hard to give shape to your belief.
It is about planning things through and organizing and leadership to implement
what you are thought through. Above all, it is about not being afraid to take
the hard route. All this at a time when the film industry per says was going
through a bad patch.

Any ones for the IT industry? Well, well, well. Am I
stretching things a bit too far? May be. But when things are bad, you can’t
help looking all around to explore what could possibly help. So could you blame
me for peeking into the unlikeliest of places like the film world in these
trying times?

Actually, if you look at it, the film industry’s formula
for success has not really been very different from that of the IT industry’s.
The way this industry has behaved in the last couple of months, it has only
brought the comparison into sharp focus. (I say this because, otherwise, there
are comparisons that can be drawn and dated even further back).

Take for instance the themes. Our film folk will follow one
success and start repeating the same thing in different forms till it drops
dead. When love is in the air you get nothing but ‘lore films’. Then it is
time for action oriented films and you get only that in various forms till you
are sick of them and someone decides to remake one of those old lore films again
with a different star cast and setting (ofcourse with all the glitter that newer
technologies provide).

Now compare this to what has been happening in IT. You had
the mainframes to start with. Then you had PCs and servers bringing in
distributed computing. And now we are going back in a way to the glass house in
a different form of central computing.

The film industry keeps dumping the some stuff on you in
different forms and in the IT industry we have the same thing happening with
some of the operating systems and processors.

One could probably go on, but that is not the idea. Suffice
it to say that it is the mindset that is the same. I guess at the root of it all
is that everyone wants to make a quick buck, (actually nothing wrong with that
in our materialistic society). So financiers in the film industry will cajole
producers to make quick remakes of what has been a hit so as to encash on the
positive sentiment created by the hit film!

We in the IT industry, ofcourse, have better names for
financiers. We call them venture capitalists. (Now do you know who is driving
the business and why the IT industry acted in such similar fashion to the film
world in the near past!) Some guy made millions selling off his venture an
anyone who could prove on paper that he too could do so got the VC’s mindshare
(and money!). And you had a situation where all the ISPs wanted to also get into
the IDC business and also become MSPs. (I would not talk about the dotcoms
anymore. It is not in fashion to do so!)

I wonder what you people would be thinking about me! How can
someone who has spent half his lifetime in the IT industry talk like this about
his own trade?

Maybe I should not. But may be that’s how all of us need to
view things. When you are in the thick of things, it is very difficult to
extricate yourself and stand apart and view things objectively. You lend to
drift with the wave. Whereas what is required is to view both macro and micro
issues and strike a balance between them.

It is easy o fall in love with your own ideas and be so
infatuated that you do not see anything else or another point of view. The
ability to be critical of your own self comes rare. The maturity to accept
others views, when you are hopelessly in love with yours does not abound.

But can you blame the IT industry for that. After all it is
so full of young people. And when you are young and impressionable, you just
fall in love with the idea of falling in love. There is nothing beyond that. No
reasons, no logic. Just lone, and for many-heart breaks!

It is unfortunate that the IT industry has not even tried to
find innovative and meaningful ways to deal with the current situation.
Organization could have used this situation to faster closer ties with its
employees. It was possible in many organizations. But they have only alienated
them and caused bitterness at large.

Like filmdom, we have created another dog-eat-dog world. This
time even within the family! That way filmdom was better.