Healthcare Concerns

By DEEPAK J. PATEL

The paradigm shift

Very frequently I am asked for my opinion on where the outsourcing industry is headed. It’s much talked about these days, especially now that the recession seems to be retreating. The market has reached an inflection point, say many. There is much more to it than that, if one were to analyze the underlying drivers.

Deepak J. Patel

Outsourced services that grew for years in different industries are continuing to do well. Most of the low-hanging fruit has already been taken up. It is therefore time to find new opportunities, and the time is indeed now, since businesses have clearly woken up to the imperative of becoming truly agile in order to succeed in the market place, especially with the recent economic turmoil and continued globalization of businesses. Outsourcing service providers thus have a unique opportunity to dive deeper into the core processes of their clients and move up the value chain.

Globalization’s impact

Globalization has been a buzzword for far too long. But with it emerged the need for enterprises to focus on delivering the best quality product or service competing across national boundaries. There were also pressures from evolving consumer needs, tastes and localization. Globalization and personalization – customizing products or services “one customer at a time” – became the mantra. This means that at any given time, companies had their hands full understanding and aligning products to customer needs across multiple markets. And at the same time, they were reacting to competing offerings and innovations from new international players across national boundaries at unprecedented price points.

Given this scenario, it is easy to predict that a few years down the line most companies will be focusing only on their “core” business and will outsource the rest to specialized players focused in that functional area or process. With experience behind them (including a full blown recession), companies are beginning to re-think what should or can be outsourced and what should not, or cannot be. Much of what was core earlier is today considered non-core and is being outsourced slowly but surely.

We see a huge paradigm shift in the industry today and the scope of outsourcing has in fact quietly increased in manifold ways and is expected to continue to accelerate over the next decade. Outsourcing is now a strategic necessity, or lever.

How has the landscape changed?

Insurance companies that were averse to outsourcing in yesteryear due to a lack of expertise and data security issues today are readily outsourcing “core” insurance functions like underwriting, adjudication of claims, marketing, reconciliation, as well as back office functions like human resources, procurement and much more. In years to come, it will not be surprising that industries at large will focus on their product/service design, intellectual property, and a differentiated approach to the market and let specialized outsourcers take care of the rest of the value chain. This way, they get the benefit of leverage and world class service at attractive service level agreements while “variabilizing” their cost structures. That gives them the flexibility to scale up and down based on their needs and taking advantage of market cycles.

Even BPOs are outsourcing what they aren’t best at. We have ourselves outsourced our HR and payroll processes recently. We know we aren’t masters of the game there and do not need to be. These are best handed over to professionals. Not only do we get the required expertise, save on cost and time, but also leverage the aggregated scale of service providers. Another example that comes to mind is of companies that provide complete infrastructure solutions. It’s a great boon for BPO firms that wish to expand quickly in different cities. They no longer need to buy or invest in facilities and find it more economical to acquire plug-and-play facilities by the seat and get going. At the same time, they have the flexibility to move out to a different location in response to client and market demands.

This will be a huge change in mindset which is also propelled by the fact that outsourcing has many more benefits than just cost reduction. It drives decreased time-to-market for new products and services, ensures a more accurate output since the work is now done by “category” experts and enhances “business knowledge” because of the up-to-date information and expertise companies get from their vendors.

Outsourcing for global competitiveness?

Building global competitiveness requires global competencies. To be globally competitive, companies need to focus on building competent skills in multiple processes in the areas of manufacturing, global sourcing and supply chain, human resource management, design and product development, financial operations, etc. If one could just outsource great chunks of this to an “expert service provider,” it would improve the company’s flexibility and value to all its stakeholders.

As a case in point, a leading manufacturer of athletic footwear decided to change tack and instead of producing shoes, its new mantra was to be a “sports and fitness company.” Having decided that its core competency was not manufacturing shoes, but designing and marketing them, it became one of the first firms to use radical outsourcing techniques, divesting ownership of factories entirely except one small R&D site. Today, it is an iconic global brand dominating the sports and fitness space.

While it’s a big decision for any company to outsource its processes, outsourcing is now altering the entire organizational structure. The opportunity is immense. Much of the market is still untapped and the face of business will change like never before in the coming decade.

—Deepak J. Patel is chief executive, Aditya Birla Minacs, a global business solutions company

By RICHARD B. WOODWARD

Boston

A superb movie involves us so convincingly in an illusory world that the more prosaic one never enters our thoughts. The dream factories of Hollywood build stories that offer a brief escape from everyday cares. Once we start looking at our watches rather than the images on the screen, the spell is broken. The director no longer has our undivided attention.

In his profoundly captivating video work “The Clock,” Christian Marclay wants us to see and hear the relentless tick-tock going on within the eidetic space of the movies. The thousands of shots he has spliced together from the history of cinema depict little else but scenes of characters checking the time, fretting about it, or surrounded by bell towers or digital clock radios that ground the action on the screen within the cycle of a fictive day and night.

The result is a functional collage that is figuratively and literally a timepiece. All the images and sounds that the artist (and his six assistants) have scavenged from the archives of world cinema refer to a particular minute and hour. These are then synchronized to the time zone in each venue where it is presented.

For instance, the bitter flashback in “Casablanca” of Rick (Humphrey Bogart) waiting like a fool in the rain with Sam (Dooley Wilson) for Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), so the trio could flee the Nazi occupation of Paris, includes a shot of a clock on the train platform that reads 4:56. The audience for “The Clock” watches this scene, too, at exactly 4:56 p.m.

Every minute of the 24-hour video is constructed with this same precision so that we experience it as a cinephile’s mix-tape as well as a working chronometer. There is no need to check your watch during a screening; it tells you the correct time outside the walls, day or night.

Art audiences have been enthralled by “The Clock,” even though few have seen the work in its entirety. Crowds lined up around the block when it was shown this spring at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art had a similar response this summer. (Mr. Marclay made an edition of six along with two artist proofs; the Museum of Modern Art just announced that it has purchased one of these copies.)

Over the weekend of Sept. 16-18, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which co-owns its copy with the National Gallery of Canada, had three special 24-hour screenings and will also be featuring the work synchronized to its normal hours through Oct. 10. There will be one final 24-hour showing on Oct. 9. It was here that I sat through more than seven hours—from 3:45 p.m. to 8 p.m. on a Friday and from 9 a.m. to noon on a Saturday. (This was a longer commitment than the typical MFA attendees I shared sofas with, most of whom walked out after less than an hour.)

Having viewed less than one-third of the whole, I’m reluctant to pronounce “The Clock” a masterpiece, as other critics have done. But from my sample I feel safe in making a few generalizations about what it does and doesn’t achieve.

Among its many virtues is the way it demonstrates (and embodies) the unique qualities of film and video as linear and temporal forms of art. The duration of a projected image is as basic to its “nature” as the substance (celluloid, tape, computer chip) on which it’s imprinted. A movie’s “running time” is essential to its being. Mr. Marclay has used this structural element to build an ingenious and self-reflexive mechanism.

“The Clock” instructs as it entertains. Only after several hours did I realize how much anxiety about time permeates the movie experience and modernity itself. The numerous panicky characters consulting their watches may be due to lazy screenwriters and directors, who rely on this cutaway shot to inject urgency into a plot.

But the prevalence of such scenes suggests the motif may have a deeper meaning. The industrial age was the first to put time in harness, and Mr. Marclay amply documents that. The dread of forgetting to be somewhere, of arriving late to school or the office, was a common 20th-century nightmare. Clocks are omnipresent in cinematic depictions of railroad stations, banks, airports, public-school classrooms, typing pools and in factories where workers punch time cards.

Except for Quasimodo (Charles Laughton) ringing the noontime bells in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” there are almost no snippets here portraying the Middle Ages, and only a few westerns. Several hourglasses make guest appearances as symbols of the era long before ours.

A surprising number of scenes express rebellion against time’s dictates, whether it’s the foster child (Michel Terrazon) in “L’enfance nue” who bangs his new wristwatch against the toilet, or Roy Hobbs (Robert Redford) in “The Natural,” the tragic hero whose mammoth homerun smashes the scoreboard clock at 4:41 p.m. and expresses a wish to transcend time, if not destroy it altogether.

There is hardly a minute in “The Clock” that is not laden with some kind of worry. The hours from 9 a.m. to noon show characters enjoying leisurely breakfasts and wake-up sex. But, at least in the history of American, English and French film, mornings are also the time for funerals, bank heists and prison executions. In “I Want to Live!” Barbara Graham (Susan Hayward) dies in the gas chamber at 11:37 a.m.

“The Clock” is both a triumph of digital editing and of “fair use” copyright law. It cost Mr. Marclay two years and a crippling injury to his mouse-clicking hands to assemble these clips. But at least he did not have to pay for them. Only the art world could reward this kind of obsession. Any commercial theater showing a movie with a running time of 24 hours would soon be out of business.

The piece has affinities with “Artist” (2000), Tracey Moffatt’s droll compilation of the clichés that film and television have relied on when portraying the lives of painters and sculptors. Neither work demands much of its audience except that we sit back and wait to identify a beloved actor in a half-remembered part. A strong backside, not a background in cinema studies, is the key to comprehending Mr. Marclay’s video in its totality.

“The Clock” further strengthens Mr. Marclay’s philosophic ties to John Cage. Both began as musicians and then extended their reach into other arts. Time is the prime material out of which their work is fashioned. Cage’s “Organ2/ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible)” a solo piece for organ designed to be played over centuries in the Church of St. Burchardi in Haberstadt, Germany—the latest version is not supposed to end until the year 2640—stands behind Mr. Marclay’s marathon project.

The popularity of “The Clock” should not be held against its creator. Mr. Marclay has taken one of the most objective measurements humans have ever devised, one that now strictly governs our working lives, and found poetry and mystery inside hard numbers.

Each hour of “The Clock” has a unique rhythm. I am eager to go back and sit through midnight to 5 a.m., times that have already become audience favorites. What’s not to like about a movie where the star, turning up more often than Cary Grant or Liv Ullman, is Big Ben? Viewing it for 15 minutes or 15 hours is time profitably spent.

Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.

By PAROMITA VOHRA

Such a surge of coverage followed the death of the Bollywood star Dev Anand this month at the age of 88 that the chairman of India’s Press Council accused the media of short-changing serious topics. The chairman was being churlish, but it’s true—the attention this actor received was unique. That’s because Indians still cherish a different time in Bollywood, when movies and characters were surprisingly more modern and sophisticated.

Born to a north Indian middle-class family, Anand arrived in Bombay in the 1940s to become an actor. A producer gave him his first break because he was struck by “his beautiful eyes and smile and supreme self-confidence.” This was Anand’s signature as a person and as an actor, producer and director over a 66-year career.

Self-confidence was key to the movies Anand starred in and directed, because he went against the zeitgeist. Many movies in 1950s India focused on feudal conflicts or family dramas. Anand’s “Black Market” (1960) and “Jewel Thief” (1967) instead were peopled by small-time thugs, petty thieves, gold-hearted molls, wisecracking mechanics and ornery shophands, dapper villains and spirited heroines.

Anand’s lead characters were unique. Indian culture sets much store in lineage and heritage, but Anand usually played drifters or orphans. These personalities were new in town, street-stylish in dress, loyal in friendship, intense in romance but ambivalent about belonging. He acted out these characters in an affected or stylized manner, as if he had created a man from scratch, unhindered by community identity, hierarchy or expectations.

Anand was strongly influenced by cosmopolitan and liberal ideas and rejected an ethos of rigidity or fatalism. His was a world of individuals making their own way by choice. There was idealism and a sense of social equality in the friendships and rag-tag alternative families that formed while surviving in the city. Anand paid no lip-service to sentimental ideas of tradition and Indian-ness.

Along with his two brothers, Anand in 1951 formed a production company called Navketan, meaning new consciousness, making some of the most successful Hindi films of all time through the 1950s and ’60s. These were successful not just in box office terms, but in how beloved they are and how strongly they both represented and shaped Indian ideas of modernity.

The new consciousness in film came along at just the right time to capture the imagination of a generation forged in upheaval. Refugees who had lost their homes in the partition that accompanied independence were resettling in India’s cities. Migrants from the countryside were also hoping to make a life in the cities and shake off the historical burdens of caste, feudalism and colonialism. Where politicians offered homilies of national progress, Anand actually showed exciting new adventures full of personal possibility.

Anand’s style became known as Bombay Noir. He often partnered with friends who shared his idealism, and his associations with the director Guru Dutt, the composers S.D. Burman and Jaidev, the singer Kishore Kumar and the Urdu political poet Sahir Ludhianvi created the golden age of Hindi cinema. Other actors and filmmakers were soon inspired and followed in his footsteps. The successful careers of film directors and writers Nasir Hussain, Raj Khosla and Shakti Samanta owed much to Anand.

This was a man who lived his screen ideals. Anand shared a legendary romance with the actress Suraiya in the 1950s, which ended when she was unable to marry him against her family’s wishes since they belonged to different religions. Anand noted later that Suraiya was the love of his life, but he realized he couldn’t really have been with a woman who held such notions. He was a modern man.

Later, he was rumored to have been involved with the much younger Zeenat Aman and Tina Munim, whom he introduced in his films of the 1970s and ’80s. Both actresses were a departure from the typical heroine of the time—more sexy than pretty, free in body and spirit.

In an industry that politically plays it safe, Anand was one of the few who spoke out against Indira Gandhi’s curb on civil liberties in 1975. This commitment to freedom of being and expression remained one of his themes throughout his career.

There are no such leading lights in Bollywood anymore, and the industry has gone back to more traditional mores. The biggest screen actors like Amitabh Bachchan prize political correctness. The big producers and directors today like Karan Johar push out movies—by the dozen—that usually revolve around a hero who doesn’t lose his roots even when he’s abroad. Meaning, he doesn’t forget he’s an upper-caste Hindu with a family estate to go back to.

Perhaps the actors and filmmakers today have no desire to be like Anand, given how his career ended. His later films, self-financed in the 1990s, have a tacky feel and were barely seen. That was the flip side of marching to his own beat.

Still, Anand remained irrepressible and, hence, beloved. In a TV interview in 2004, he was asked: “What made you, just a small-town boy, imagine you could be a movie star?” Anand shrugged: “I must have looked in the mirror.” There was no arrogance there, just conviction.

Ms. Vohra is a documentary filmmaker and writer based in Mumbai.