Indian IT boom gets arthritis

JUST WHEN IT appeared that the Indian IT invasion had brought the Western industry to fat and lazy knees, an act of one or another of the Hindu gods appears to have intervened.

Three quarters of IT workers in Bangalore, India's backoffice to Silicon Valley, have "musculoskeletal symptoms related to work", or RSI as its otherwise known - that debilitating disease that in its worst cases has people crying in pain and frustration every time they try and pick up the kettle to make a cup of chai.

Dr Deepak Sharan, medical director of Bangalore's RECOUP
Neuromusculoskeletal Rehabilitation Centre, found that 75 per cent of 30,000 people surveyed over seven years had symptoms - though only 20 per cent were in permanent, generalised pain.

Curiously, he didn't blame the working conditions of call-centres
serving Western markets for these work-related symptoms. Workers appeared to be bringing the problem on themselves through their immoral out of work activities.

He blamed it on "incorrect use of Ipods, playstations and mobiles,"
according to a report in todays Times of India.

We think it has all the trappings of a plague cast by Lakshmi, the
four-armed goddess of wealth and fortune. She might have a bee in her bonnet about all the irreligious fraternising between the sexes in the back corridors of Bangalorean call centres. Ipods can only make matters worse. µ