The Boogeyman of The Offshore

On cold wintry nights you speak of me in hushed tones to your children as they gather around the fireplace to hear you. You tell them tales of horror about me, the distant faceless monster that has no heart and no scruples. You speak of the damage I cause and destruction that I bring. You speak, with a involuntary shudder of my home seven seas away, where I do things unspeakable. Your imagination adds wings to your tongue as you speak deep into the night as the storm rages outside. Your eyes take a glazed look and your voice breaks, just a little, as you convince the little children and yourself that I truly am the boogeyman, who's out to get you.

Have you ever wondered who is this boogeyman is in his real life? Is he really the sadistic monster that you make him out to be? Is he really sloppy at his work and closed in his thinking as you would want to believe? Have you psyched yourself so much that now you are ready to swear that he is too culturally challenged in his approach to life to do anything other seat down for hours and churn out low quality code and greet you with a heavily accented hello from the other end of a toll-free number? And know what? Evolution has adapted him to have a heavy duty bladder that he doesn't need bathroom breaks at work anymore. Rumour has it that in all the sweat shops in the dreaded land of offshore they are breaking down the bathrooms and putting-up tiny cubicles in their place.

Well pardner, you have got another thing coming - the realization that we may have been left in a muck fifty years back but we no longer live there. We have clawed our way out, neither inspite of you nor because of you, but because we had to. Yes, your way of life, where fairplay and integrity formed an inseparable part of life, did fill us with inspiration, as did our own philosophy of honesty, non-violence and truth. We have always been fascinated by your capability of out-of-box thinking and have often supplemented that with our strength of methodical industriousness. The root cause of many of the successes that we have tasted together, has been honest collaboration. It has been teamwork that has always won.

And did I get something very wrong, because I though somewhere along the way we had become friends.

After all this, don't go around showing me your paper clippings and URLs, which cry out how many jobs been eaten by the offshore boogeyman. Don't cite examples of projects messed by the boogeyman. And for heaven's sake don't kill yourself trying to reverse the wheel of time.

At the beginning of industrial revolution when machine replaced artisans that worked with their hands, you reinveted yourself into factory workers and made the machines your partner in success. When the upstart computer took over the job of the office clerk, you mastered programming it. Now that you are at another cross-road you need to figure out which way you want to go. I only know that hating me or trying to fight me won't get you there - it will just hurt us both. No one wins in this mudfest.

So stop whining, friend (I hope I can still call you that) and stop scaring yourself and your kids with old wives tales that you know are not true. Go out there and create your destiny anew.

And know this, I am rooting for you.