IITBHF and IITBAA (http://www.iitbombay.org)

By SUEIN L. HWANG and PUI-WING TAM
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Like many companies that lost staff in the Sept. 11 attacks, Wipro Ltd. has struggled through dwindling hopes and growing grief over some employees who didn't make it out of the World Trade Center that day. But Wipro executives are also facing a different struggle. Troubling reports have trickled in from the software-outsourcing company's front lines of a changed attitude among some clients. Instead of showing sympathy, some have grown aloof, Wipro executives say, occasionally dressing down Wipro's on-site consultants and giving them strange looks. "Some clients have been testier than they would otherwise have been," says Vice Chairman Vivek Paul, who heads Wipro's U.S. operations out of Santa Clara, Calif. Mr. Paul thinks he knows why: He and the vast majority of Wipro's U.S. workers are ethnically Indian.

Around the country, there have been dozens of reports of racist harassment and even assault in the wake of the terrorism. In Mesa, Ariz., a Sikh gas-station owner was shot to death, allegedly by a man who described himself as a patriot. But the biased responses haven't been limited to a few violent incidents in remote locales. Bias has also showed up in seemingly cosmopolitan places.

Among them are California's Silicon Valley and Seattle, where immigrants from the Indian subcontinent are the executives, venture capitalists, salespeople and scientists behind many high-tech companies. There, despite having nothing to do with the hijackers, some ethnic Indians and Pakistanis are struggling with the consequences of their physical appearance.

A venture capitalist tells of offering his hand to a group of strangers at a meeting and finding no one in the room would shake it. A Microsoft Corp. veteran has cut his travel schedule by two-thirds after a threatening gesture was made to his son at a bus stop. A high-profile marketing executive has decided to avoid public functions out of concern that he is a liability to his company.

Silicon Valley Shock

Those affected stress that the bias incidents are the exception. Many executives of Middle-Eastern or South Asian appearance say they have felt no change in the environment at all, while others point to support they have received in recent days. At Wipro, which has 1,300 U.S. workers, most of them ethnically Indian, the number of bias reports is in single digits, executives say.

Wipro executives also are quick to note that an employee's perceptions can color a situation, and say they don't rule out the chance that some employees read too much into a situation. "We don't want people to put two and two together and make it five," says Raja Veluswamy, human-resources manager.

Still, the appearance of ethnic tensions comes as a shock to many executives in Silicon Valley, a capitalist bastion that attracts fortune seekers from all over the world. Zia Chishti, a Muslim with one Pakistani parent, says the phone calls and e-mails started soon after the Sept. 11 attacks.

...

Three days after the attacks, Supreet Manchanda, a venture capitalist, attended a strategy meeting at a San Francisco electronics-distribution company. His contact was still stuck in traffic when Mr. Manchanda arrived, leaving him to face eight executives he hadn't met. He says he extended his hand, only to realize that the others were keeping their arms crossed. Recovering, Mr. Manchanda tried to turn his gesture into a half wave as naturally as he could. "Who here is not American?" he says he told the group. "I'm an American."

Mr. Manchanda says he now brings a list of talking points for business presentations. Among them: He is a U.S. citizen who has lived in America since 1981, and is neither Arab nor Muslim. "A one-hour meeting is taking two hours because I have to spend 15 minutes out of every hour talking about this stuff," he grouses.

Amid a tech slowdown made worse by the terrorism, any added client aloofness or animosity is "one more hurdle to cross," says Wipro's Mr. Paul. "Selling outsourcing services in a boom time is a lot easier than during layoffs," he says. "The combination of xenophobia and layoffs makes it tougher."

Palm Executive Curbs Travel

Anxiety about the possibility of bias has changed the way Palm Inc. marketing chief Satjiv Chahil does business. A colorful schmoozer, Mr. Chahil has never shied from the spotlight, hobnobbing with executives around the globe and jetting off to European film festivals. He once persuaded model Claudia Schiffer to push a Palm hand-held device. Now Mr. Chahil has curtailed his travel to public functions because, as an India-born Sikh, he is concerned that his beard, turban and dark skin might be a liability both personally and professionally.

"They might look at me at say, 'You can't trust this guy,'" Mr. Chahil says. "We're at the center of the bull's eye right now." He has taken to wearing blue-and-red turbans to show his U.S. allegiance.

While Silicon Valley has long attracted technical talent world-wide, in the 1990s it saw a big influx in Indians and other South Asians. In 1990, about 75% of foreign-born engineers and programmers were of Chinese descent, says Norman Matloff, a computer-science professor at University of California at Davis. But yet-unpublished numbers from the Immigration and Naturalization Service show that Indian immigrants who came to the U.S. last year on H1-B visas to work in the computer industry outnumbered ethnic Chinese by eight-to-one.

About 10% of Silicon Valley executives and engineers now are of Indian descent, according to a June survey by Rafiq Dossani, a researcher at the Asia Pacific Research Center at Stanford University. He explains that India produces 120,000 electrical-engineering and computer-science graduates a year, compared with 30,000 in the U.S., and that many Indian universities have strong connections to Silicon Valley. "There's an almost infinite supply of skilled engineers from India compared to the U.S.," he says.

Nationally, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund received hundreds of complaints of discrimination, says the group's executive director, Margaret Fung. "It has had a major impact on Indians as well as Sikhs and other non-Muslim South Asians," she says.

The discrimination has affected a wide range of people of vaguely Middle Eastern appearance, such as in the Arizona killing of a Sikh gas-station owner, Balbir Singh Sodhi. An aircraft mechanic has been charged with murder in that case. In Boston, teenagers hurled a Molotov cocktail into an Indian-owned grocery store. In Lancaster, Calif., in late September, a Hispanic motorist, Geraldo Pimentel, was bumped by two men who he believes mistook him for an Iranian.

More than 200 Sikh-Americans suffered violent harassment nationally in the aftermath of Sept. 11, according to an association of Sikh temples in the San Francisco Bay area which has been closely monitoring the situation.

A Threat in Seattle

Vijay Vashee (BTech '74 EE), a Microsoft general manager, vowed for a while after the terror attack that he wouldn't let possible bias disrupt his work. But he says that two weekends ago, while his teenage stepson waited at a bus stop in Seattle's affluent Mercer Island neighborhood, two men in a green van pulled up and drew fingers across their throats. "Until then, I felt I should stand by my principles," he says. "But if it can happen to my stepson on Mercer Island, it could happen anywhere." Mr. Vashee has sharply cut back his travel schedule.

At Wipro, ethnic backlash was the last thing on Mr. Paul's mind as he sat at San Francisco's International Airport early on the morning of Sept. 11. He was doing what most Silicon Valley executives do these days, worrying about "making the numbers." Wipro, based in Bangalore, India, has been one of India's biggest high-tech successes. By offering the software services of highly skilled workers at competitive prices, and snapping up blue-chip clients, it has doubled profits annually. But lately its growth has been blunted by the declining fortunes of U.S. technology companies.

At the airport, Mr. Paul's ruminations were interrupted when an airline attendant said his flight was delayed. He soon found out why, and within a few phone calls realized that some of Wipro consultants were working at insurer Marsh & McLennan Cos., on the 97th floor of One World Trade Center.

Wipro set up a call center in Santa Clara and was besieged by hundreds of calls from terrified friends and relatives. Dozens of employees were found safe. But four consultants, aged 26 to 33, were not.

Employees hunted through every hospital and staked out the missing workers' apartments. For days, erroneous reports and e-mail messages -- such as reports that a badly burned Indian executive had been found at a hospital -- occasionally sent hope surging through the company. Chairman Azim Premji, usually in India, was two blocks away from the twin towers and narrowly missed disaster himself.

Two weeks ago, as hope of finding the four workers alive began to fade, Wipro's executives tried to turn their attention back to their business. As expected, some clients were putting off sales closings. Less expected, however, was the steady trickle of reports from employees that some clients were treating them differently.

The reports were varied and usually ambiguous. No one had attacked any of the employees, destroyed property or voiced racial epithets. Yet under the surface, a handful of clients were perceived to be acting differently. Some Wipro consultants reported unpleasant looks. Others said that since the bombing, clients seemed less satisfied with their performance, growing more upset than usual when things went wrong.

The employees believe "the tolerance level has gone down," says Mr. Veluswamy, the human-resources manager. "Something is different."

Though convinced such incidents are isolated ones, Wipro executives are taking no chances, and have developed a strategy for handling a backlash. Part of the strategy is unformed, and will depend on how the U.S. responds to the crisis. But Wipro is already taking two steps. It is asking employees not to engage in political or ideological debate and instructing them not to be overly aggressive or demanding. Secondly, it is asking employees to educate customers and clients about India's recent political history, showing them that Wipro's homeland is worlds apart from the anti-American factions in Afghanistan.

Wipro managers are putting together a few pages on its initiative that it hopes to distribute to all U.S. employees later this week. Mr. Paul now wears a small button depicting the U.S. and Indian flags crossed. He is having more buttons made for the rest of his company. For New York clients affected by the terror attacks, Wipro has offered its services free.

Over the long term, Mr. Paul believes the crisis could help foster more understanding between the U.S. and India -- which has also suffered much at the hands of terrorists -- and strengthen the relationship between the two countries. "We believe this will bring out a closer alliance between India and the U.S. as we both face a common enemy," he says.

Write to Suein L. Hwang at suein.hwang[!]wsj.com and Pui-Wing Tam at pui-wing.tam[!]wsj.com

Please review the Terms of Usage provided on the disclaimer page prior to accessing this website. ACCESSING THIS WEBSITE ("www.iitbombay.org") SIGNIFIES YOUR AGREEMENT TO THE TERMS OF USAGE.