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BACK OF THE BOOK
Dome Sweet Home

A city of domes is rising from the arid Deccan Plateau, the brainchild of an American company that offers Indian techies a bait of the unusual, says E. Kumar Sharma

Porter at New Oroville: coming home to the curves

Swain porter, 36, does drive in India-with a prayer on his lips. ''You drive with the hope that someone else does not ram into you,'' says the affable American, slamming on the brakes of his gleaming, maroon Ford Ikon to avoid a charging autorickshaw. ''I call these yuck yucks,'' he says of the rickshaw, and takes a deep breath before he explains his cardinal principle in life is to, well, simply stay alive.

India often makes the Westerner philosophise thus. So it's not surprising that when Porter's 18 month-old company, Catalytic Software, decided to take advantage of low costs, great programmers, blah, blah, and set up operations in India, transportation and pollution were the key hurdles to overcome. Their solution: build their own community.

About 40 minutes out of Hyderabad on the Bangalore highway, this community is taking shape, but in a radical form. From a distance Porter's new city looks like strange giant igloos rising from the arid Deccan Plateau. Up close, the grey, concrete structures betray their purpose: the emerging shelters of what is billed to be the first ''dome city'' in the world.

Welcome to the 21st century company town-or so they say. Spread over 500 acres, (though currently only 50 acres has been acquired), the dream town is called New Oroville, inspired by obscure, Oroville (population: 1,585), Washington. It happens to be the home town of Porter and Catalytic's Chairman and Co-founder Eric Engstrom. Dome city is meant to be a self-sustaining company community for the employees of Catalytic Software. Catalytic is a software company, but unlike many others that write code for software programmes and applications, it intends to focus on the deeply embedded matrices of operating systems.

TREADMILL

Remix Your Own Workout

If you caught treadmill a couple of issues back, you'd have found me growling about my local gym's penchant for playing Hindi film music during early morning workouts. Many of my gym friends think I'm unreasonable and fanatical about it, but I have always believed that a good work out has a lot to do with the kind of music you do it to-like (yes, go ahead and kill me for this analogy) a good wine has a lot to do with the glass in which you drink it! But, finally, I seem to have been vindicated. By Men's Health, which asked Richard Hart, a fitness music producer (yes, they have such vocations in the US!) about the right kind of music to help pace different kinds of workouts. And here's what Hart has to say:

Running: the ideal track to listen to is Pink Floyd's 'Run Like Hell'; cycling: try doing it to the beat of Van Halen's 'Panama'; lifting or pumping iron: haul that T-bar to Led Zeppelin's 'Black Dog', one rep for every four beats-yes, now we're talking. Hart even has for you the ideal music for pre-workout warm-ups: Santana's 'Black Magic Woman'!

Of course, not all of us can be his own gym DJ. Not unless you have your own private gym. But everyone must have his own private workout. Here are four golden rules of working out wisely. Follow them and you'll see how quickly you get that ripped look.

Rule No. 1: Never do what the other guy is doing. If you see someone doing heavy squats for awesome quadriceps and gluteals (outer thighs and the butt, stupid!), but your weak knees won't stand up to squats, don't worry, you can do other exercises for your legs.

Rule No. 2: Pain ain't equal to productivity. After a new workout, muscles can get sore. But if the soreness is in your joints or on one side of the body, that could be bad news... like an injury.

Rule No. 3: Every set has an objective. It's either a light warmup set that will be followed by heavier ones or a back-off set with more reps aimed at exhausting the muscle fibres. If you aren't clear why you're doing the set, don't do it.

Rule No. 4: Break a record, everyday. It won't make it to the Guinness Book when you barely manage to bench press 85 kg instead of your regular 80, but that's what makes a workout worthwhile. Every day set out to break an old record. Yes, and set a new personal record.

-MUSCLES MANI


Over the next three to five years they plan to build a variety of 4,000 domes with private gardens, and all within a short walk of work, school, recreation, shopping, and public facilities. Each employee is to get a private office at work and each home will be wired with fibre. In full cry, New Oroville will have four indoor recreational complexes: an ice arena where ice hockey will be taught and played, an Olympic-size swimming pool, and a gymnasium. There are also plans for food stores, shopping malls, and movie theatres. Also a large meditation centre apart from a temple, a mosque and a church. Whew! The cost: $200 million. Catalytic says that's still hugely cheaper than setting up shop in America.

Dome City is just about 5 km away from a proposed international airport in the region, and is virtually at one end of the proposed over 4,000 acre-hardware park. ''The best part is that we are not dependent on the state government to provide any infrastructure except electricity,'' says Goutham Koka, 47, Vice-President (Operations). All of New Oroville's water needs will, for instance, be met by recycling borewell water and rain-water harvesting.

Why domes? Porter says domes are faster to build, stronger and sturdier than almost any other structure. Also, since domes enclose the most amount of space with the least surface area, they are cool in summer and warm in winter.

These particular domes (26 ft tall, 32 ft in diameter each) are designed in such a manner that they can be easily expanded to three floors, allowing more than 2,200 square feet of floor space. The company expects to foot the bill through revenue and outside investment. Phase one of New Oroville-about 30 domes-should be complete by March 2002 with 100 techies in residence. This, however, is a long way off from what is on the ground at the moment. A rough investment of Rs 60 lakh has been made given that each dome costs between Rs 8 lakh and Rs 10 lakh, and there's only a core team of 25 people. (This was the official version; right now there seem to be a total of three software developers and one test manager on the field).

Company officials, however, say that they have a lot of resumes, locally and from Indians in the U.S. keen to return home. ''We will make some crorepatis in just five years,'' boasts Porter. Apart from paying higher than industry-average salaries, catalyst says the main incentives for employees here are learning on the job with ex-Microsoft stars, the subsidised dome homes, and most importantly, a quality of life that has all the conveniences of living in the US.

Why Hyderabad? Porter says, ''We looked at Chennai, Bangalore, Delhi, Pune, Khandala, and Dehradun, but picked Hyderabad for many reasons.'' More than a fifth of India's techies come from this region; it happens to be the cleanest and greenest city in the country, and land is easily available. But perhaps the most important reason is very Indian. The chief minister, confides Porter, is ''only a phone call away''.

At the moment, though much of the project is visible as a statement of intent, especially the ice-arena and hotel plans, it does not seem to deter Catalytic staff from getting into the groove of being New Orovillians. Like K.V.A. Meenakshi, 24, a receptionist busy learning c language. She's waiting for the swimming pool, getting a chance to ''work with the Americans,'' and waiting to move into her home sweet dome.


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