It doesn’t snow in Bangalore and expecting a white Christmas is, well, like expecting Santa to come down the chimney and stuff your stockings with goodies. It didn’t happen yesterday, right? Santa, Mr Bingle, Rudolph and the top elf are not coming.
But our homes and malls and restaurants and schools are going to be lit with twinkling rice lights, faux mistletoe and holly, lots of snowy cotton, tinsel, baubles, ribbons and bows. Despite their artificial presence, they have the magical power to remind us that this is the season for giving. G for Giving. Not G for Greed.
After almost 20 months of unpleasant news, that jobs were being hacked, pink slips were being distributed and generally skid row was over-populated, it’s time to shrug off the bad news. Zapak, MphasiS, Sapient, IBM, Yahoo, Goldman Sachs and countless others in Bangalore were forced to downsize in the recession — a sort of binge-and-purge phenomenon that is beyond ordinary comprehension. But greed does appear to be frosting over.
Staffing company TeamLease, in its Employment Outlook Report for October-December 2009, said that while the employment outlook for the current quarter was that of cautious optimism, additional hires were expected to increase in the coming quarter of 2010. The TeamLease study covered 495 companies focusing on the employment growth potential in major cities across the country.
But the Employment Outlook Report said that attrition rates in Bangalore were still the highest — at 16% — compared to other cities. So maybe it is time for companies in Bangalore to bring about a small shift in their approach to being “caring”. We know that there isn’t a company in Bangalore that doesn’t have a Corporate Social Responsibility program that aims at giving back to society — encouraging rainwater harvesting, planting gulmohur saplings and sending their teams on weekends to teach underserved children.
Maybe these companies should think about incorporating giving into their programs aimed at employees first and consider recycling paper cups later. The importance of giving cannot be emphasised enough. It is a growing trend across the world, a major shift from “taking” and “using”. Employees today want companies that care, not in the we-care-about-the-environment way, but in the way they see unfolding around them.
Where are the signs of Giving? Corporate cubicles often miss major trends that herald a shift in social customs and mores. Corporate honchos claim to intuitively understand what their next-in-command is feeling, but they need to read the most obvious trends of the year in the papers first and then have them reconfirmed through market surveys.
Meanwhile, online cultures that have embraced collaboration, crowd-sourcing and sharing point to a change that is upon us. A change that spells giving. Let’s examine some notions and then some numbers. Isn’t Flickr for your kids? And what use can free videos be to anyone? So, isn’t YouTube for the jobless? However, to get some perspective, Flickr has over 33 million users (some countries have smaller populations) and 4 billion images. It witnesses more than 3,000 new image uploads every minute. Now here’s real Cheddar: the largest number of Flickr users (38%) are aged between 25 and 34. It’s no longer just kids who are building out Flickr.
Also, 13 hours of video are uploaded to You Tube every minute…but let’s not even go there. TripAdvisor has over 20,000,000 user-generated hotel reviews that the above-mentioned honchos rely upon when taking private vacations.
Perhaps sharing pictures, videos and hotel reviews sounds trivial. So, let’s take a quantum leap: for their next summer vacation, the same major domos will perhaps use CouchSurfing, which, as of this Christmas eve, had more than 1.5 million registered users across 232 countries ready to host people in their homes.
You can read that again: these are ordinary folks ready to give rooms for free in their homes to people they’ve never met. In Greece. In Turkey. In Slovakia. In Ghana. In Bangalore. Even Comoros (now, where’s that?). That’s ‘giving’ on a global scale.
So, in the last couple of hundred words we have moved from Christmas to bad news to good news to social responsibility projects, online trends that spell community change and finally, of all places, to Comoros. Where is this headed? Connect the dots and you’ll see that G is for Generosity. Happy New Year.
The writer is a content and communications consultant
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