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Cool, confident and creative. Seeks challenges, loves risks and shuns fear." Indian

zippies feel no guilt about making money or spending it. They are, says one Indian

analyst quoted by Outlook, "destination driven, not destiny driven, outward looking,

not inward, upwardly mobile, not stuck-in-my-station-in-life." With 54 percent of

India under the age of twenty-five-that's 555 million people-six out of ten Indian

households have at least one potential zippie. And the zippies don't just have a

pent-up demand for good jobs; they want the good life.

It all happened so fast. P. V. Kannan, the CEO and cofounder of the Indian call-center

company 24/7 Customer, told me that in the last decade, he went from sweating out

whether he would ever get a chance to work in America to becoming one of the leading

figures in the outsourcing of services from America to the rest of the world.

"I will never forget when I applied for a visa to come to the United States," Kannan

recalled. "It was March 1991.1 had gotten a B.A. in chartered accountancy from the

[Indian] Institute of Chartered Accountants. I was twenty-three, and my girlfriend

was twenty-five. She was also a chartered accountant. I had graduated at age twenty

and had been working for the Tata Consultancy group. So was my girlfriend. And we

both got job offers through a body shop [a recruiting firm specializing in importing

Indian talent for companies in America] to work as programmers for IBM. So we went

to the U.S. consulate in Bombay. The recruiting service was based in Bombay. In those

days, there was always a very long line to get visas to the United States, and there

were people who would

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actually sleep in the line and hold places and you could go buy their place for 20

rupees. But we went by ourselves and stood in line and we finally got in to see the

man who did the interview. He was an American [consular official]. His job was to

ask questions and try to figure out whether we were going to do the work and then

come back to India or try to stay in America. They judge by some secret formula. We

used to call it 'the lottery'-you went and stood in line and it was a life lottery,

because everything was dependent on it."

There were actually books and seminars in India devoted entirely to the subject of

how to prepare for a work visa interview at the U.S. embassy. It was the only way

for skilled Indian engineers really to exploit their talent. "I remember one tip was

to always go professionally dressed," said Kannan, "so [my girlfriend and I] were

both in our best clothes. After the interview is over, the man doesn't tell you

anything. You had to wait until the evening to know the results. But meanwhile, the

whole day was hell. To distract our minds, we just walked the streets of Bombay and

went shopping. We would go back and forth, 'What if I get in and you don't? What if

you get in and I don't?' I can't tell you how anxious we were, because so much was

riding on it. It was torture. So in the evening we go back and both of us got visas,

but I got a five-year multiple entry and my girlfriend got a six-month visa. She was

crying. She did not understand what it meant. 'I can only stay for six months?' I

tried to explain to her that you just need to get in and then everything can be worked

out."

While many Indians still want to come to America to work and study, thanks to the

triple convergence many of them can now compete at the highest levels, and be decently

paid, by staying at home. In a flat world, you can innovate without having to emigrate.

Said Kannan, "My daughter will never have to sweat that out." In a flat world, he

explained, "there is no one visa officer who can keep you out of the system . . .

It's a plug-and-play world."

One of the most dynamic pluggers and players I met in India was Rajesh Rao, founder

and CEO of Dhruva Interactive, a small Indian game company based in Bangalore. If

I could offer you one person who embodies the triple convergence, it is Rajesh. He

and his firm show us what happens when an Indian zippie plugs into the ten flatteners.

Dhruva is located in a converted house on a quiet street in a residential neighborhood

of Bangalore. When I stopped in for avisit, I found two floors of Indian game designers

and artists, trained in computer graphics, working on PCs, drawing various games and

animated characters for American and European clients. The artists and designers were

listening to music on headphones as they worked. Occasionally, they took a break by

playing a group computer game, in which all the designers could try to chase and kill

one another at once on their computer screens. Dhruva has already produced some very

innovative games- from a computer tennis game you can play on the screen of your cell

phone to a computer pool game you can play on your PC or laptop. In 2004, it bought

the rights to use Charlie Chaplin's image for mobile computer games. That's right-a

start-up Indian game company today owns the Chaplin image for use in mobile computer

games.

In Bangalore and in later e-mail conversations, I asked Rajesh, who is in his early

thirties, to walk me through how he became a player in the global game business from

Bangalore.

"The first defining moment for me dates back to the early nineties," said Rajesh,

a smallish, mustachioed figure with the ambition of a heavyweight boxer. "Having lived

and worked in Europe, as a student, I was clear in my choice that I would not leave

India. I wanted to do my thing from India, do something that would be globally

respected and something that would make a difference in India. I started my company

in Bangalore as a one-man operation on March 15, 1995. My father gave me the seed

money for the bank loan that bought me a computer and a 14.4 kbp modem. I set out

to do multimedia applications aimed at the education and industry sectors. By 1997,

we were a five-man team. We had done some pathbreaking work in our chosen field, but

we realized that this was not challenging us enough. End of Dhruva 1.0.

"In March 1997, we partnered with Intel and began the process of reinventing ourselves

into a gaming company. By mid-1998, we were showing global players what we were capable

of by way of both designing games and developing the outsourced portions of games

designed by others. On November 26, 1998, we signed our first major game development

project with Infogrames Entertainment, a French gaming

company. In hindsight, I think the deal we landed was due to the pragmatism of one

man in Infogrames more than anything else. We did a great job on the game, but it

was never published. It was a big blow for us, but the quality of our work spoke for

itself, so we survived. The most important lesson we learned: We could do it, but

we had to get smart. Going for all or nothing-that is, signing up to make only a full

game or nothing at all-was not sustainable. We had to look at positioning ourselves

differently. End of Dhruva 2.0."

This led to the start of Dhruva's 3.0 era-positioning Dhruva as a provider of game

development services. The computer game business is already enormous, every year

grossing more revenue than Hollywood, andit already had some tradition of outsourcing

game characters to countries like Canada and Australia. "In March 2001, we sent out

our new game demo, Saloon, to the world," said Rajesh. "The theme was the American

Wild Wild West, and the setting was a saloon in a small town after business hours,

with the barman cleaning up ... None of us had ever seen a real saloon before, but

we researched the look and feel [of a saloon] using the Internet and Google. The choice

of the theme was deliberate. We wanted potential clients in the U.S.A. and Europe

to be convinced that Indians can 'get it.' The demo was a hit, it landed us a bunch

of outsourced business, and we have been a successful company ever since."

Could he have done this a decade earlier, before the world got so flat?

"Never," said Rajesh.Several things had to come together. The first was to have enough

installed bandwidth so he could e-mail game content and instructions back and forth

between his own company and his American clients. The second factor, said Rajesh,

was the spread of PCs for use in both business and at home, with people getting very

comfortable using them in a variety of tasks. "PCs are everywhere," he said. "The

penetration is relatively decent even in India today."

The third factor, though, was the emergence of the work flow software and Internet

applications that made it possible for a Dhruva to go into business as a

minimultinational from day one: Word, Outlook, NetMeeting, 3D Studio MAX. But Google

is the key. "It's fantastic," said Rajesh. "One of the things that's always an issue

for our clients from the West is, 'Will

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you Indians be able to understand the subtle nuances of Western content?' Now, to

a large extent, it was a very valid question. But the Internet has helped us to be

able to aggregate different kinds of content at the touch of a button, and today if

someone asks you to make something that looks like Tom and Jerry, you just say 'Google

Tom & Jerry' and you've got tons and tons of pictures and information and reviews

and write-ups about Tom and Jerry, which you can read and simulate."

While people were focusing on the boom and bust of the dot-coms, Rajesh explained,

the real revolution was taking place more quietly. It was the fact that all over the

world, people, en masse, were starting to get comfortable with the new global

infrastructure. "We are just at the beginning of being efficient in using it," he

said. "There is a lot more we can do with this infrastructure, as more and more people

shift to becoming paperless in their offices and realize that distances really [do]

not matter ... It will supercharge all of this. It's really going to be a different

world."

Moreover, in the old days, these software programs would have been priced beyond the

means of a little Indian game start-up, but not anymore, thanks in part to the

open-source free software movement. Said Rajesh, "The cost of software tools would

have remained where the interested parties wanted them to be if it was not for the

deluge of rather efficient freeware and shareware products that sprung up in the early

2000s. Microsoft Windows, Office, 3D Studio MAX, Adobe Photoshop-each of these

programs would have been priced higher than they are today if not for the many

freeware/shareware programs that were comparable and compelling. The Internet

brought to the table the element of choice and instant comparison that did not exist

before for a little company like ours . . . Already we have in our gaming industry

artists and designers working from home, something unimaginable a few years back,

given the fact that developing games is a highly interactive process. They connect

into the company's internal system over the Internet, using a secure feature called

VPN [virtual private network], making their presence no different from the guy in

the next cubicle."

The Internet now makes this whole world "like one marketplace," added Rajesh. "This

infrastructure is not only going to facilitate sourcing

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of work to the best price, best quality, from the best place, it is also going to

enable a great amount of sharing of practices and knowledge, and it's going to be

'I can learn from you and you can learn from me' like never before. It's very good

for the world. The economy is going to drive integration and the integration is going

to drive the economy."

There is no reason the United States should not benefit from this trend, Rajesh

insisted. What Dhruva is doing is pioneering computer gaming within Indian society.

When the Indian market starts to embrace gaming as a mainstream social activity,

Dhruva willalready be positioned to take advantage. But by then, heargued, the market

"will be so huge that there will be a lot of opportunity for content to come from

outside. And, hey, the Americans are way ahead in terms of the ability to know what

games can work and what won't work and in terms of being at the cutting edge of

design-so this is a bilateral thing . . . Every perceived dollar or opportunity that

is lost today [from an American point of view because of outsourcing] is actually

going to come back to you times ten, once the market here is unleashed . . . Just

remember, we are a 300-million middle class-larger than the size of your country or

Europe."

Yes, he noted, India right now has a great advantage in having a pool of educated,

low-wage English speakers with a strong service etiquette in their DNA and an

enterprising spirit. "So, sure, for the moment, we are leading the so-called wave

of service outsourcing of various kinds of new things," said Rajesh. "But I believe

that there should be no doubt that this is just the beginning. If [Indians] think

that they've got something going and there is something they can keep that's not going

to go anywhere, that will be a big mistake, because we have got Eastern Europe, which

is waking up, and we have got China, which is waiting to get on the services bandwagon

to do various things. I mean, you can source the best product or service or capacity

or competency from anywhere in the world today, because of this whole infrastructure

that is being put into place. The only thing that inhibits you from doing that is

your readiness to make use of this infrastructure. So as different businesses, and

as different people, get more comfortable using this infrastructure, you are going

to see a huge explosion. It is a matter of five to seven years and we will have a

huge batch of excellent English-speaking Chinese graduates