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Nimesh and his two worlds
(A story about the presence)
If anyone had told him in 1993 that he would live in two optimally
functioning worlds at the same time in 2004, Nimesh would have declared that
person out of his mind. To be honest, in those days he had hardly heard of
the Internet, let alone dared to dream that he would ever become so involved
in it!
And now he was sitting here, in the small but well-furnished office he had
ordered to be built annex his house in Vlaanderen, Belgium. He felt good and
satisfied about his accomplishments so far. He leaned back and reminisced
about the course his life took in the past 10 years:
It had all started in 1993, when he became eligible for a student exchange
program between the U.S. and India. Nimesh was a star graduate from Punjab
University, where he had also been teaching for a couple of years now.
Arriving in America, he enrolled into a university with beautiful view on
the mysterious Pacific. That was where he earned his Masters degree in
Business Administration within 18 months. From there û it was 1995 at the
time û things moved into a rapid. While he enrolled and devoted himself to a
doctoral education at yet another university, he accepted a job at one of
the local, world famous film studios as marketing director. Nevertheless,
Nimesh felt his interest in the Internet growing, and started looking for
ways to apply the knowledge he gained through his MBA education through this
medium.
One of the first things he did was to teach himself how to develop a
professional website. Yes, complete with pictures. His friends in the U.S.
had explained to him how important it was to have a Web presence in order to
establish a trust relationship. For how easy and handy wasnÆt it to just
hand potential contacts your URL, so that they could review your
information, with resume and all. How time- and energy efficient too!
For his doctoral study Nimesh had to conduct a respectable amount of
research on the Net, which only enhanced his curiosity and insights into
this dynamic phenomenon. He maintained regular email contact with his
previous colleagues in Punjab and got approached by one of them for a vacant
position in another Indian city: Bangalore. They were planning on creating a
new center for global service, and he could obtain an important position
there if he wanted.
As soon as his doctoral education was finalized Nimesh stepped on a plane to
Bangalore. It was 1999, and the global center was fully under construction.
But Nimesh wasted no time: with his knowledge and skillfulness regarding the
Net, he started to build an immense network. He established contacts with
companies of all origins and in all corners of the world, registered them in
a database, and regularly emailed them an overview of the available services
from Bangalore.
The responses did not take too long to arrive. For letÆs be fair: business
primarily spins around the bottom line. And it was a simple calculation for
globally performing organizations in the writing, analyst,
electro-technical, organizational-behavioral, economical, architectural,
hydraulic, judicial, radiological, tax-developmental, and service-providing
sectors to see that they would have to pay an hourly rate to the
Bangalorians that was way lower than what they were paying their local
workers. And with todayÆs fast transmissions, there would be no delay in
getting the job done, nor a decrease in quality of the job!
Slowly but surely the concept of traveling on the digital highway turned
into the most profitable alternative for a growing number of companies and
workers throughout the world.
In 2002, Nimesh moved to Belgium, as he fell in love with the Flemisch and
wanted to escape the ever-increasing crowdedness of Bangalore. Besides, he
could do his job as professional matchmaker and executive consultant from
practically every part of the world. He did his banking on the Net; shopped
on the Net; gave work-orders to his two assistants, one in the Netherlands
and one in the global center in Bangalore, through the Net; lectured two
online classes, one in Australia and one in the U.S., through the Net; and
had even met his lovely wife Marianne, a South African beauty, on the Net.
For Nimesh there was practically no reason to leave his home and comfortable
office, his contact point with the world. And IF he had to travel, and that
happened 4 times a year when he led his quarterly seminars in Bangalore and
Punjab, he just took his office with him, in a practical handheld device
with wireless connection, of course. Nimesh had deliberately kept the
activity of traveling to the seminar locations this way, as he wanted to
maintain some physical connection with humanity. A few times, he had chaired
an online seminar, and the results were phenomenal: For that occasion there
had been participating members from 5 continents, and no one had been
required to engage in expensive, tiresome traveling, with hotel reservation,
car rentals, and all the other discomforts that go along with it.
Oh well, a human being should see something of the old, familiar world,
right? Or would this wish be perfect past tense before too long?
Joan Marques, Burbank, April 1, 2004
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About the Author:
Joan Marques emigrated from Suriname, South America, to California, U.S., in
1998. She holds a doctorate in Organizational Leadership, a MasterÆs in
Business Administration, and is currently a university instructor in
Business and Management in Burbank, California. You may visit her web sites
at
http://www.joanmarques.com <
http://www.joanmarques.com/> and
http://www.spiritcounts.com <
http://www.spiritcounts.com/>
Joan's manual "Feel Good About Yourself," a six part series to get you over
the bumps in life and onto success, can be purchased and downloaded at:
http://www.non-books.com/FeelGoodSeries.html-----------------------------------------------------
It is better to live in serene poverty than in hectic affluence. Everything
has a price. The price for nurturing your soul is turning away from
excessive stress, destruction of self-respect, and the constant strive in
lifestyle with the Joneses. But itÆs worth it.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
