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number of graduates in India. Once more, I steel myself for what’s to come. ‘So there were eighty thousand graduates in 2000, around two hundred and fifty thousand in 2006 and, if I had to estimate the current rate, I’d say it would be around three hundred thousand.’ The figures have a purpose. He wants me to understand the dilemma facing contemporary India: ‘quantity versus quality’. If you were to handpick ten tomatoes, he explains, you can choose carefully. If you pick ten thousand, you cannot. It’s meant as a generic truth, which he then applies to his employer. Infosys finds itself in the second bucket. The IT giant recruits between fifteen and eighteen thousand graduates every year. ‘Ensuring the best level of quality is what we try and achieve on this campus.’
    He flicks to the next slide, which outlines the core components of the three-month training course: technical competency, soft skills, process orientation, English-language fluency. ‘The ultimate goal’, he says with a flurry of his hands, ‘is to make a person production-ready.’
    He makes the new stock of trainees sound like computer microchips, readying themselves to be commoditised, marshalled into line and then shunted out of the factory gates. As he continues through his slides, the impression grows. Twenty-four days of basic IT training. Twenty-two days’ tech-specific instruction on JAVA, .Net and a variety of Open Software Frameworks. Ten days’ POST: Project Organisational Standards Training. All the while, the new recruits are expected to be busying themselves with technical assignments, case studies and group projects. Libraries and computer labs open twenty-four hours a day. There are no discos, alcohol is forbidden and curfew falls at eleven o’clock. It’s Tech Boot Camp in all but name.
    Slide Six deals with ‘Building a Conducive LearningEnvironment’. Again, Infosys’s desire to manufacture the country’s smartest programmers covers every angle. All the classrooms have ‘smart’ whiteboards linked to the trainer’s computer and on-desk terminals for each student. The company’s combined intelligence – essays, think pieces, programming advice, reviews, et cetera – is all accessible through KSHOP, Infosys’s online knowledge portal. Furthermore, the teachers are ‘A1 professionals’, as good as any university faculty.
    ‘Conducive Learning’, Manjunathea clarifies, includes close attention to the new recruits’ private lives as well. Students are housed in plush chalet rooms with maid service and the latest mod cons. For meals, they have the choice of seven food courts. As for leisure, Manjunathea reels off a selection of the facilities: a fully equipped gym, a swimming pool, four squash courts, a bowling alley, a full-size cricket stadium, a soccer pitch, tennis courts, an athletics track, a huge sports hall, a snooker hall, a health club, even salsa classes.
    Occupying more than three hundred acres of once barren land on the edge of Mysore city, the campus has the feel of an upmarket seaside resort. The list of other amenities makes life more or less self-contained: a launderette, a hairdresser, a Domino Pizza restaurant, a supermarket called Loyal World, a health centre, Vodafone and Airtel stores, an outlet of fashion retailer Indigo Nation, several banks and a one-thousand-four-hundred-seat cinema. Partially submerged, the latter looks akin to a gigantic metal golf ball plugged in a bunker. As with Mahindra World City, there is no temple or mosque, no whiff of religion whatsoever. At Infosys, the gods are quiet and every miracle made by human hand.
    At the end of the extensive briefing, Manjunathea offers to take me for a quick tour. To facilitate transportation around the sprawling campus, Infosys puts five thousand bicycles at the disposal of its fresh-faced trainees. We take a golf cart. He shows me the library first. The shelves hold sixty thousand books. Prominent on the ‘Advised Reading’