BANGALORE, India -- Computer program analyst Arvind Nimbalker has dreams that would be familiar to any young man doing well in his first job. He wants to buy a car, a motorcycle and stereo equipment.

His acquisitive lifestyle, though, is of little interest to his parents, who grew up in an India with a state-controlled economy and severe shortages of basic commodities and consumer goods.

	Mahesh Bhat, Special to the Post-Gazette
	Ranjani Narayanan, a young worker at Infosys in Bangalore, has reason to laugh. She is one of just 9,000 college graduates the company hired recently out of more than 1 million Indians who applied.

"My standard of living is better than my parents'," Nimbalker said as he had lunch with a co-worker in one of the open-air food courts that dot the verdant campus of Infosys Technologies in Bangalore.

"But they are definitely happier people because they don't have very high expectations from things," said Nimbalker, a 2000 graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. "Probably our generation is more materialistic than they are."

Whether or not they are less satisfied with life than their parents are, the drive to get ahead among these young people is what many experts think may finally help propel India into a modern economic giant.

Most of the workers who are staffing India's offices and call centers are in their 20s -- half of the population is under 25 -- and just a few years ago many of them were living much more traditional lives with their parents in villages and small towns.

The lifestyle changes began when the nation started to move away from Soviet-style central planning about 12 years ago, a process that is far from complete. Lately, the changes have been coming at warp speed.

The contrast can be seen through one device: the telephone.

India had only 2.5 million telephones in 1980 for a population that was then 700 million; the parents of today's tech workers had to wait years to get one. Many rural areas were never wired for conventional fixed-line service. Even if you had a phone, it was rare to get a number on the first try.

Today, India is the world's fastest-growing telecom market, with more than a million mobile phone subscriptions sold each month. They are ubiquitous in Bangalore and becoming common in the countryside.

From malls to nightspots
Called Zippies by the Indian weekly magazine, Outlook, because they walk with "zip in their stride," the new cadre of tech employees epitomizes a "fairly dramatic change," said Infosys chief executive Nandan Nilekani. "We have never had [a situation] in this country where people, at a relatively young age, have had material success as defined by a home, a car and disposable incomes ... It has brought in a lot more westernization."

Young workers in Bangalore hang out in coffee bars, take in movies, wander through shops with credit cards at the ready, and visit nightspots like the Underground, decked out like an English subway station, or NASA, where a waiter looking like a Star Trek character will deliver drinks called Alien Invasion and Stealth Bomber.

Young women working at Infosys wear both traditional, loose-fitting Indian dresses and sandals, or American-style jeans with imported Nike or Adidas sneakers. Some use modern cosmetics; others have classic talik stripes or bindi dots on the foreheads.

The starting annual salary at Infosys is $4,500, enough to propel personal spending, since it is nine times more than the country's average annual income of $500.

S.V. Ashwini, an Infosys programmer who works on projects for Apple Computer, spends her money shopping, dancing, bowling, going to the movies and eating out at restaurants with friends.

"This job honestly has given me financial independence. I don't have to go to my mum and ask her for pocket money as I had to when I was in college," she said. "It has also given me a lot of confidence in myself that I can go ahead, achieve a lot of things. I've grown as a person."

T.P. Prabhakaran, who started his own medical transcription and physician services company, Pradot Technologies, nine years ago, when he was 21, said the 24-hour schedule of service businesses like his are changing family dynamics.

"It's a stress for the parents. They are not all able to absorb the changes," Prabhakaran said. "Today many of us are away from our parents. Tradition in some respects is totally lost."

Social restrictions ease
Two decades ago it would have been virtually inconceivable for a teen-age girl to work at all. Then, office work became more acceptable, as long as it was from 9 to 5. Now, it is becoming more common for young women to work at night, particularly in call centers whose shifts are tuned to time zones in the west.

Bangalore is 10 ^{1*_{2 hours ahead of Pittsburgh, so a call center employee wanting to reach people in Western Pennsylvania during regular working hours would be on duty from 7:30 p.m. to 3:30 a.m. in Bangalore.}}

^{_{Amidst all this change, there is a new confidence in the air in Bangalore, a can-do attitude among workers who believe their future is in business, not the government jobs that were a route to success for many of their middle-class parents.}}

^{_{David Iwinski, Jr., CEO of Pittsburgh's Acusis Inc., said he sees it all the time on his trips to India. It energizes him to visit Bangalore six or seven times a year and come home to Pittsburgh with more business ideas than he took with him to India.}}

^{_{"It's very inspiring to see the intensity and the desire which people have to do a good job. They are passionate. They are self driven," he said. "It's really a very intoxicating atmosphere."}}

^{_{"When you go to China, when you go to India, you find people that have this fire in their bellies," added Carlos Cardosa, president of the metalworking group at Kennametal Inc. of Latrobe.}}

^{_{"This is the fire in the belly that I had when I came to the [United States], and the fire in the belly that my kids don't have," Cardosa, a native of Portugal, said after touring Kennametal's world-class plant in Bangalore. "I do believe that we take things for granted in the U.S."}}

^{_{That fervor may even begin to attract non-Indians to work here.}}

^{_{Krishna Murthy, vice president of product delivery for iGate Global Solutions, said he is receiving resumes not just from Indians who want to return home, but also from British and American nationals who want to put offshoring experience on their resumes.}}

^{_{He and his wife just returned to India themselves after living for several years in New Jersey. In many ways, he said, their lives have improved, even though roads, utilities and other services in Bangalore are poor or unreliable compared with the United States.}}

^{_{They have relatives to help them take care of their daughter, and "I can afford a maid. I can afford a chauffeur -- all of the stuff that we couldn't afford in the U.S.'' Murthy said.}}

^{_{Even for younger workers who don't have those luxuries, life is good -- and many of them can't understand why they are being blamed for American workers' problems.}}

^{_{After all, they ask, aren't they just doing what America's free market ideals have taught them to do -- get a good education, work hard and try to get ahead?}}

^{_{"You should not shy away from competition. If the competition is fair, then you should be able to face up to it,'' said Infosys' Ashwini. "By blaming countries like India, by saying they provide cheaper services so people are losing their jobs, I don't think that will solve the problem."}}

^{_{Or, as Acusis manager Ananda Sanjeev put it:}}

^{_{"The world is a market. Competition can come from anybody. If I today can live with an American refrigerator, a South Korean car, a fabric that is made in China, a cell phone that is made in Finland, and work in India, get paid in Indian rupees, I don't know why an American can't do the same."}}