Joan Marques - Ed.D., MBA.
Burbank, California

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?