GLOBEANDMAIL: A collapse of Western financial industries has sent thousands of skilled professionals from immigrant backgrounds to their homelands - a huge shift of knowledge and skills
LONDON — Five months ago, Pankaj Dinodia was on top of the Wall Street boom: At age 25, the Indian immigrant had made it through one of the top U.S. business schools and held an important investment banking position with Goldman Sachs.
Then, in the middle of the summer, he felt the calling. The future didn't look so good in the big Western markets, he decided.
Those calls from his family in New Delhi, urging him to come back and help out with the family accounting business, sounded more sensible. So he gave up his huge bonus and got on a plane.
At the time, his move from the world's most successful investment bank to the poky New Delhi offices of S.R. Dinodia & Co., Chartered Accountants, bewildered his friends and colleagues: It was as if he had abandoned his future.
Now they're all phoning him.
People like Mr. Dinodia are pioneers in the "reverse brain drain," a huge shift of knowledge and skills out of New York and London and back into the developing world. In one of the surprising consequences of the global financial meltdown, the collapse of the Western banking and finance industries has sent thousands of highly skilled professionals from immigrant backgrounds back to their homelands, where they are taking on key roles in emerging economies.
"I have ridden the bubble to the top and got out when things started looking shaky, but a lot of my colleagues have lost their jobs ... the Lehman Brothers of the world, the Bear Stearns of the world are no longer sucking up talent from India but instead sending it back," Mr. Dinodia said from New Delhi the other day.
"So companies here can now hire bankers with the kind of experience we never could have dreamed of employing before the crunch." >>> Doug Saunders | December 11, 2008
The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Paperback – Canada) >>>
The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Hardback – Canada) >>>
