Indian manufacturing companies are going all out to woo expat talent in digital, artificial intelligence and other new-age technologies, as they seek to strengthen their global footprint with improved products. Companies in sectors such as automobile, industrial, pharmaceutical, chemical and packaging are keen on bringing in people familiar with international best practices who can replicate the quality and precision of developed markets such as North America, the UK, Korea, Japan and Germany. Over the last six months, automaker Mahindra & Mahindra has hired six expats for top-level posts while the diversified Vedanta Ltd in February brought in five expats at senior levels in India. A spokesperson for Hero MotoCorp said several experts have joined the company of late. "There has been an increase in expat hiring in the last six months. Expat hiring isn't about numbers but about inducting appropriate capabilities and talent," said Rajeshwar Tripathi, chief people officer, M&M, which last year inducted 15 expats at senior levels.

The year Jojo and I started eighth grade, the power plant officially cut electricity to two hours a day. We'd already been through years of brownouts, of flickering lights, blinking monitors, older ag drones without artificial neural networks rebooting in their stations and randomly launching to spray the fields again or overfeed the chickens. So when Public Works & Electric issued a message to all our devices telling us about its irregular hours of operation, no one was surprised. The message was full of obfuscating language, but anyone with a tide chart could spot the correlation. Anyone driving down the causeway to the airport, past the power plant, could see through its chain-link fence the turbines standing silent, tense as raised shoulders; the grounds swamped in seawater, the ebbing tide dragging out an iridescent Rorschach of petroleum.