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Nimesh and his
two worlds (A story about the presence)
If anyone had told him in
1993 that he would live in two optimally functioning worlds at the same time in
2004, Nimesh would have declared that person out of his mind. To be honest, in
those days he had hardly heard of the Internet, let alone dared to dream that he
would ever become so involved in it!
And now he was sitting here,
in the small but well-furnished office he had ordered to be built annex his
house in Vlaanderen, Belgium. He felt good and satisfied about his
accomplishments so far. He leaned back and reminisced about the course his life
took in the past 10 years:
It had all started in 1993,
when he became eligible for a student exchange program between the U.S. and
India. Nimesh was a star graduate from Punjab University, where he had also been
teaching for a couple of years now.
Arriving in America, he
enrolled into a university with beautiful view on the mysterious Pacific. That
was where he earned his Masters degree in Business Administration within 18
months. From there – it was 1995 at the time – things moved into a rapid. While
he enrolled and devoted himself to a doctoral education at yet another
university, he accepted a job at one of the local, world famous film studios as
marketing director. Nevertheless, Nimesh felt his interest in the Internet
growing, and started looking for ways to apply the knowledge he gained through
his MBA education through this medium.
One of the first things he
did was to teach himself how to develop a professional website. Yes, complete
with pictures. His friends in the U.S. had explained to him how important it was
to have a Web presence in order to establish a trust relationship. For how easy
and handy wasn’t it to just hand potential contacts your URL, so that they could
review your information, with resume and all. How time- and energy efficient
too!
For his doctoral study
Nimesh had to conduct a respectable amount of research on the Net, which only
enhanced his curiosity and insights into this dynamic phenomenon. He maintained
regular email contact with his previous colleagues in Punjab and got approached
by one of them for a vacant position in another Indian city: Bangalore. They
were planning on creating a new center for global service, and he could obtain
an important position there if he wanted.
As soon as his doctoral
education was finalized Nimesh stepped on a plane to Bangalore. It was 1999, and
the global center was fully under construction. But Nimesh wasted no time: with
his knowledge and skillfulness regarding the Net, he started to build an immense
network. He established contacts with companies of all origins and in all
corners of the world, registered them in a database, and regularly emailed them
an overview of the available services from Bangalore.
The responses did not take
too long to arrive. For let’s be fair: business primarily spins around the
bottom line. And it was a simple calculation for globally performing
organizations in the writing, analyst, electro-technical,
organizational-behavioral, economical, architectural, hydraulic, judicial,
radiological, tax-developmental, and service-providing sectors to see that they
would have to pay an hourly rate to the Bangalorians that was way lower than
what they were paying their local workers. And with today’s fast transmissions,
there would be no delay in getting the job done, nor a decrease in quality of
the job!
Slowly but surely the
concept of traveling on the digital highway turned into the most profitable
alternative for a growing number of companies and workers throughout the
world.
In 2002, Nimesh moved to
Belgium, as he fell in love with the Flemisch and wanted to escape the
ever-increasing crowdedness of Bangalore. Besides, he could do his job as
professional matchmaker and executive consultant from practically every part of
the world. He did his banking on the Net; shopped on the Net; gave work-orders
to his two assistants, one in the Netherlands and one in the global center in
Bangalore, through the Net; lectured two online classes, one in Australia and
one in the U.S., through the Net; and had even met his lovely wife Marianne, a
South African beauty, on the Net.
For Nimesh there was
practically no reason to leave his home and comfortable office, his contact
point with the world. And IF he had to travel, and that happened 4 times a year
when he led his quarterly seminars in Bangalore and Punjab, he just took his
office with him, in a practical handheld device with wireless connection, of
course. Nimesh had deliberately kept the activity of traveling to the seminar
locations this way, as he wanted to maintain some physical connection with
humanity. A few times, he had chaired an online seminar, and the results were
phenomenal: For that occasion there had been participating members from 5
continents, and no one had been required to engage in expensive, tiresome
traveling, with hotel reservation, car rentals, and all the other discomforts
that go along with it.
Oh well, a human being
should see something of the old, familiar world, right? Or would this wish be
perfect past tense before too long?
Joan Marques, Burbank, April
1, 2004 --------------------------------------------------- About the
Author: Joan Marques emigrated from Suriname, South America, to California,
U.S., in 1998. She holds a doctorate in Organizational Leadership, a Master’s in
Business Administration, and is currently a university instructor in Business
and Management in Burbank, California. You may visit her web sites at http://www.joanmarques.com and http://www.spiritcounts.com Joan's
manual "Feel Good About Yourself," a six part series to get you over the bumps
in life and onto success, can be purchased and downloaded at: http://www.non-books.com/FeelGoodSeries.html
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