Arjun is one of the brightest youngsters I have known. His parents sent him to some of the best schools in the country and he took a scholarship to Oxford via St Stephen’s. Till then the melody was flawless to me but after Oxford he went and took up a finance job in the city in London. I felt hugely disappointed.
After a time he quit and joined an MBA programme at Wharton and I kept my fingers crossed. My spirits soared when I learnt that as he was finishing his programme he was paying periodic visits to India to work on a maternal and child care project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. But I was crestfallen when his father told me that on getting his MBA he planned to join Wall Street.
I have a sense of ownership about Arjun. His parents, college sweethearts who married, and I are batchmates and they are among my closest friends. I also like to feel I played a tiny role in Arjun’s intellectual development. While in middle school he was confined to bed for a period by a stubborn surgery wound and during that time read right through the complete works of Arthur Conan Doyle, that is all of Sherlock Holmes — a present I had given him. Now imagine the leap that the deductive logic of a youngster will take if he can thoroughly digest Sherlock Holmes, not to speak of his resultant command over the English language.
When he joined financial services in the city, I thought, what on earth for. If it has to be financial services why not work on an innovative model for the better delivery and popularity of micro-finance. Surely society has better challenges to offer to someone who has the brains and the discipline to go a long way. These days are not the same as they were nearly four decades ago when family pressure made me quit my trainee journalist’s job at The Statesman and take up what was then a prized job in SBI.
Over time I found that most of my batchmates had got into banking simply because there was then such a paucity of good jobs. Things are so different today. Or are they? I recently met a bright youngster who was an IIT graduate in a micro finance firm, loving his job. When I quizzed him about the link between engineering and micro finance he told me about some of his engineer friends who had joined the software sector when it was booming but didn’t like one bit what they were doing.
This mismatch came up again when our son spoke about some of his college friends who had gone on to join a couple of the most prestigious post-graduate institutions for economics in the country. They didn’t relate to the course material they were going through but persevered nevertheless because there was a good job at the end of it. One of his friends who did a summer internship with the Indian research wing of a renowned Swiss bank got a foretaste of what was in store. Those like him with quantitative skills — being able to find patterns in lots of data — didn’t find their job challenging. They did their work but the broker dealers were guided more by concerns other than the results that number crunching threw up.
All this comes together when compensation in the financial service sector is such an issue in the west where banks are drowning partly because of the innovations worked out by the brightest of kids gone awry. The big question being posed is if you need to pay fancy salaries and bonuses to attract the best and the brightest to the financial services. Does the sector need that much of innovation, in relation to the needs of other sectors?
The plight of Britain seems to be particularly acute. In a fascinating exchange in the Financial Times recently one of the senior commentators took a colleague to task on this issue — pay in the city. The response of the latter was significant. He argued that Britain needed to do all it could to get the best into financial services because that was its cutting edge globally. Thankfully most other countries have not bidden goodbye to other sectors of the economy and relied excessively on financial services for a winning formula.
But it is more than financial services. It is about what work you do and what makes you happy. If you want to make a pile and then do other things then that makes sense. In Bangalore there are two organisations, one now a prominent NGO and another a micro-finance outfit, both founded by former bankers who made their pile and moved on. I have a feeling Arjun will do the same.
