Life abounds in ironies.

Some weirder than others.

As anyone who can move a mouse quickly realizes, Indians arrived late to the computer and software party.

We owe modern computer hardware, software and the Internet to the pioneering work at American research institutions like Xerox PARC and Bell Labs, the U.S. Defense Department and scores of tech companies including IBM, HP, Microsoft, Apple and Google not to forget the hordes of defunct corporations (Sun, DEC and Tandem, to name a few).

Desis Steal Thunder

But thanks largely to cheaper labor costs, over the last two decades Indians have stolen the programming thunder from the Americans.

IBM, HP, Google and dozens of U.S. companies have outsourced software development to India and/or bring Brown cowboys to the U.S. on H1B visas that turn into Green Cards and ultimately into citizenship (or as local Gujjus like to say, shittyjaincheap).

Rampant outsourcing and liberal grant of H1B visas flung thousands of American programmers under the bus. Fired American programmers had to train their Indian replacements to obtain severance.

Seeing the plight of their parents, uncles, aunts and cousins, many American students opted not to take computer science courses in colleges and universities. The galloping cost of tuition and the economic downturn further reduced the output of computer science and other engineering graduates.

Outsourcing and H1B Visas exploded meantime.

Today, the majority of large U.S. corporations (Wall St, big pharma, manufacturing and service providers) and countless medium-sized business rely on Indian programmers to keep their cash registers ringing.

As the newly arrived Indians prospered, the plight of local Whites and Blacks worsened.

Indians are now driving late model BMWs and Lexus SUVs while Americans make do with rusty jalopies.

Indians eat at California Pizza Kitchen and Dum Biryani joints while Americans scrounge for crappy pizza at Domino’s, hormone burgers at McDonald’s and the Gen Tso’s Chicken monstrosity at the local Ping-Pong Chinese restaurant.

Indians vacation in Costa Rica and Turks and Caicos while Americans dream of a weekend trip to the Poconos.

Indians win the Spelling Bee year after year while American English sounds increasingly like the Lallu Prasad Yadav version of English.

Americans are dropping out of the Middle Class faster than Rajinikanth and Ajith Kumar can put out flops.

At this rate, Indian Americans will soon prove to be the primary backers of the amusing trinity of Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul as most Americans run out of greenbacks.

Obama’s Solution – Grab $100m from Indians

I love the ingenuity of American politicians.

When it comes to craftiness, White (Bill Clinton), Black (Barack Obama) and Brown (Bobby Jindal) American politicians are the same vily bastards.

Out of the outsourcing and H1B ‘lemon’ that U.S. corporations handed them, Obama and his boodler predecessors made a lemonade – They held a gun to Indian H1B visa applicants’ heads and extorted hundreds of millions from Tenali Ramudus and Komanam Muthupandis.

The extortion was legal and done under the aegis of American Competitiveness and Workforce Improvement Act of 1998 to train U.S. workers. Depending on the size of their company, U.S. employers must pay an additional $750 or $1,500 when they sponsor a foreign worker for a H1B visa.

Since the bulk of H1B visas in the IT sector goes to Indian companies like Infosys, Wipro, TCS, iGate, HCL and Satyam, Indians are essentially forking out hundreds of millions of dollars to better educate Walmart Americans.

Fair deal, if you ask me.

Now Obamas is taking $100 million from the Indian H1B ‘contribution’ to U.S. education and using it to teach coding to lower class Americans, minorities and veterans.

Unveiling the $100 million program Monday, Obama bestowed upon it a fancy name – TechHire.

If anyone had told me two decades back that Indians would be ‘donating’ $100 million to the U.S. government to teach coding skills to Americans, I’d have anon called the nearby mental hospital.

But life abounds in ironies (no, I don’t expect the $100 million program is adequate to equip a critical mass of Americans with programming skills).

Although I won’t be around to witness the bizarre sight, don’t be surprised when you encounter the stampede of American workers applying for ‘H1B Visas’ at the Chinese and Indian embassies in less than two decades.

As I hinted at the outset, what seems outright crazy today is the numbing reality two decades hence.