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display is Narayana Murthy’s collection of speeches, the optimistically entitled A Better India: A Better World . I wander over to the magazine rack. For downtime, students can pick between Dataquest , Developer IQ , PC Quest and a host of other technology titles. I thumb through a copy of Visual Studio . ‘Code # Contracts in .NET 4’, the headline article reads. I scan the first few paragraphs and put the magazine back. The contents might as well have been in Klingon.
    From the library, we make our way to the Global Education Centre, known on campus as GEC 1. Groups of young graduates are making their way to class. Boys and girls walk separately, segregated by cultural instinct rather than corporate edict. We briefly sit in on the last of the morning sessions. There are roughly a hundred ‘fresh entrants’ in the theatre-style classroom, all sitting behind an Acer Computer watching the lecturer on the stage. She speaks quickly. ‘. . . structure members are accessing the dot operator . . . a structure can be embedded in another structure; a pointer can point to a structure . . .’ She loses me immediately.
    We head to an open-air cafe, where Manjunathea introduces me to two students on a free period. He asks if they have five minutes to talk with me, a request to which they politely assent.
    Pushing aside their open textbooks, they wait for me to start. I’m slightly reticent. From Manjunathea’s presentation, I half expect them to be brainwashed programmers capable of responding only in code. Neither does, of course. Indeed, both turn out to be extremely personable and highly fluent. Twenty-one-year-old Amrutha describes herself as an electronics undergraduate from Bengaluru. It’s her first time living away from home. I ask her about her experience on campus and she says she felt a ‘little bewildered at first, you know’, but is more settled now. Her parents, she points out, are ‘more than happy’ to see her here.
    Prianka is one year older and the more outgoing of the two. Originally from Bhopal, she talks of the ‘wow factor’ that she and all the students feel on arriving at the campus. She’s the first in her family to get a job ‘in corporate’, as she puts it. As with Amrutha, she too feels it necessary to stress the contentedness of her family with her choice of employer. ‘They are happy for us to be independent,’ she says of her expectant parents, ‘but they want usto settle and save our salary too.’ Both girls expect to marry in ‘four or five years’. I ask if they’ll carry on working afterwards. ‘It depends,’ Prianka says. Depends on what? She doesn’t respond, just smiles and hunches her shoulders. ‘Just depends.’ Both would certainly like to build careers at Infosys, they add. ‘The last thing we want to do after studying so hard is to sit at home.’ Prianka giggles and Amrutha joins in. They agree that the money is good too. The girls are cagey about telling me exactly what their starting salary is, but Prianka provides an illuminating comparison. ‘Put it this way, it took years and years for my father to start earning what I earned in my first week.’ I ask what he does. He works for Western Coal Fields Limited, she tells me, ‘a quasi-government group’.
    Gopi had talked about India’s gradual economic liberalisation, about how the state was loosening its grip, freeing the private sector up to grow. Prianka and Amrutha were born at the outset of that process. Not all Indians have seen their prospects improve, but these young women certainly have. Their career hopes and earning power both speak of a remarkable generational transition, a shift that now offers them opportunities inconceivable to their parents.
    Sat on a nearby bench, Manjunathea taps his watch face. I thank the graduate pair and leave them to their break time. Looking back from across the quad, I turn to wave. Both are already looking down, however, their noses buried back in their