Video: This spoof on India’s IT layoffs is probably the only opportunity to laugh at the crisis
The All India Coders’ Association is out on the streets chanting slogans against IT bosses.
The current rush of mass layoffs at IT firms in India has been referred to as a“Nightmare on IT street” and the biggest the industry has seen since 2008, when the global economy crashed.
Outraged technology workers are protesting the loss of jobs online, but what if there were an organised protest on the issue? That’s what the Tamil comedy YouTube channel Temple Monkeys depicts in its latest video, which has the fictional All India Coders’ Association out on the streets, chanting slogans against Infosys’s NR Narayan Murthy, Wipro’s Aziz Premji, and TCS’s Rajesh Gopinathan. In the background, Donald Trump and Google CEO Sundar Pichai wonder why if they “laid off the whole world, only these people are protesting?”
“Why is no one scolding me?” asks Trump, to which Pichai responds: “These people are like this, they won’t scold the one who is responsible.” Their commentary continues as the protestors wonder what they should do next. Trump ponders, “Don’t you people know anything apart from engineering?” Pichai, who is the American president’s India guide, shoots back: “Yeah, we get trained for that in our school only.”
The seven-minute spoof is as densely packed with light moments as the team’s hilarious skewering of the NEET dress code. They take off on everything from pop culture, such as the incomprehensible plot of Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi blockbuster Interstellar, to internet habits. Pointing out why humans trump computers and why automation is not the way forward, one of the protestors loudly exclaims: “I’ll hit Alt-tab and quickly change the porn screen to MS Dos when the manager comes in, within a second. Will your AI do that?”
