The job market comes full circle

SWOT

The news of Cushrow Irani's passing last week came as an oblique reminder of just how much the job market in India has changed in a space of two decades.

Mr Irani, who was Editor-in-Chief of The Statesman, was the first person to turn down my application for a job. This was not, I must hasten to clarify, out of inclination but as a result of the sheer pressures of the time.

There I was, a newly minted graduate with a surprisingly (for me at least) good degree. The world was at my feet, I thought, and The Statesman was where I wanted to be. I had grown up on its high-quality reportage and JS, its exciting teen magazine with its comics, posters of Modesty Blaise and Bruce Lee, its Kookie Col column and the entertaining irreverence of its tone.

I was desperately keen to be part of an organisation that served three-course lunches and whose brilliantly eccentric edit writers, legend had it, penned their articles on the back of Charminar packs in between burra pegs of rum and vodka at Olympia Bar.

About a week after I met him, Mr Irani was kind enough to call and tell me The Statesman wasn't going to employ me. The consensus among his editors, it turned out, was that they didn't want women around on the editing desk, so that was that.

Now, Mr Irani was also a close family friend and those were the days when such relationships could lubricate your entrée into respectable employment. So I admired and respected the courtesy he extended to his colleagues by not overriding their opinion, however out-moded.

"Wait a while, things will change," he urged me. This was in the eighties, not the early part of the century.

By then, I had also received an extremely flattering rejection from a Mumbai-based multinational. The unwritten sub-text of that skillful snub was that, among other things, I was the wrong gender and therefore might find it difficult to meet the challenges of the job. All the same, I appreciated the professional civility the organisation displayed in sending a response to my job application, however negative.

Most corporations didn't bother to reply to my laboriously compiled application, even as loads of male friends, less qualified than I, were cruising through job interview after job interview. My tally: precisely one with an economic paper that I failed ignominiously.

Four months later, Mr Irani called to ask, would I join the paper now? He had finally persuaded The Statesman's senior journalists to enter the 20th century and employ women as journalists. Other women were about to join, so perhaps I would like to enrol with them.

I refused, partly because I didn't particularly feel like being one of The Statesman's token women sub-editors. Also by then, I had blundered into Business Standard, which was kind enough to employ me at the princely sum of Rs 800 a month.

I had started to enjoy the colourful dilettantism of the Ananda Bazar group's Kolkata office and was reluctant to leave. Besides, I was learning rapidly under the fierce, disorganised tutelage of my first boss, a woman who could out-rewrite, out-edit, out-ideate and out-smoke many of the men there.

This was also the time that Rajiv Gandhi partially liberalised the economy, so business journalism had unexpectedly become an exciting branch of the profession (if not a particularly well-paid one). The ABP group had been at the forefront of employing women, first in its now closed weekly magazine Sunday and, later, in its (then) new daily The Telegraph.

It was a comfortable place to be in, because talent and ability were valued irrespective of gender. I was glad I stayed, though Mr Irani never failed to ask me why I worked for "that rag" whenever we met thereafter.

None of these early failures to secure a job turned me militantly feminist, not least because, by and large, Business Standard followed a non-discriminatory policy as, in fact, did most Indian media houses. But I cannot help pondering on how much things have changed in the corporate world, where competition is forcing corporations to think similarly.

Gender discrimination in terms of job selection in India may not have disappeared, but it has certainly lessened appreciably. In the upper echelons of management, it has all but become a non-issue. And just sometimes, I think corporations, in a bid to appear "progressive", tend to err on the side of reverse discrimination.

Indeed, it was with some wry amusement that I discovered last year that the same MNC that had so magnificently rejected my application was now planning to focus on recruiting more women executives. This is as silly as not recruiting them at all. Talent and ability are gender-neutral.

Why force the issue?

(The views expressed here are personal)