Thirty-four and unemployed: Former Infoscion Umesh Malhotra plays chess with children ant Hippocampus, a Rs 2-crore, 6,000 sq ft library he built that has 70,000 hand picked books

One's focussing on tennis. Two on helping children grow up better. Another is waiting for the right job. All salarymen, they are rich, rich, rich.

Umesh Malhotra was ranked 250th in the country in the CBSE exams. He went to IIT Madras, landed a software job, married a colleague, bought his first car-a Beetle-with borrowed money when he was 23, was sent to the US on work and was soon responsible for 5 per cent of the revenue of his fast growing company. Definitely a career graph that was headed north. Now, 34-year-old Malhotra has a 10-year-old son, a wife who gave up her job long ago, and is unemployed.

Spare yourself the trouble of feeling sorry for the man. Malhotra chooses to just be. A peek at his schedule for a week, any week, is sure to make your turn a viler shade of green. Sunday is for rock climbing. Monday is time for the wife even if it just means stocking up on groceries. Tuesday afternoons are for playing chess with children. This past Wednesday was spent looking for a magician. Thursday was time spent luring a friend to come and bake cookies with children...it goes on in that vein.

In 1990, Malhotra joined a Rs 1 crore company called Infosys. The first he had heard of the company was at the college canteen a few hours before the interview. Today, by some estimates, he and at least 75 more people who either worked for the company or still do have tucked away nest eggs of somewhere between Rs 10 crore and Rs 20 crore. Malhotra's son and his son, in turn, probably don't have to go through the 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. grind for sustenance.

Blame it on India's reforms process. Stock options, dollar salaries and an economy which values expertise (it pays very high salaries for performance) are creating a breed of Indians, who can, even in their early 30s (or, at the most, 40s) hang up their gloves and take time off to think about what they really want to do. Adding numbers to this tribe are Indians who have crossed the seas, made it big, and are back in India because of the sense of optimism here and a rapidly rising standard of living.

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And the good news (for the rest of us, that is) is that this tribe of Indians can't just stay home. Their idea of chilling is 'to make a difference'. Malhotra has blown Rs 2 crore building Hippocampus, a 6,000-square feet library with 70,000 hand-picked books in Bangalore's very upmarket Koramangala. On paper, Hippocampus is a company. It will be a hub for different kinds of children's activities. It will be a profitable non-profit venture that will sustain itself and make enough money to expand.

Soon Malhotra wants to build something that will reach out to underprivileged children too. He himself spends about four to six hours a day, four days a week on Hippocampus-related activities and lot of that with children, playing chess, rappelling, even just playing hide-and-seek. Behind all this levity is a serious purpose. "Our education system is geared to produce nerds. Every parent just assumes that their child will be among the top 10 per cent in the school. I think children should be equipped with different kinds of skills," he holds forth.

When he is not with children, Malhotra is either evangelising his lifestyle or meeting other adults who are on a trip too. Vijay Kavale, his ex-colleague from Infosys is into watching birds. He has set up a site called Indiabirds.com, travels around, takes pictures and does a lot of documentation.

Just this week, Malhotra met up with Saumil Majumdar, who has raised funds to lease tracts of land in Bangalore's hsr layout, just about five kilometres from Malhotra's Hippocampus, to run a sports village for children. Majumdar went to IIM Bangalore, worked with Wipro, started a tech support company called Qsupport for which he raised funding, and later exited.

Malhotra's close buddy-a bachelor who does not want to be named who dropped out of his university course in the US to become a salesman-came back to India to help Fedex set up operations here. For those three years he was raking in more than $100,000 (Rs 46 lakh) tax-free annually, a salary that would be considered way above average even in the US. Then he teamed up with Malhotra and a couple of others to start up a tech company, which they sold. For two years after selling out, he was into theatre and has now emerged again and raised $2 million (Rs 9.2 crore) for a company which will promote competitive sports like tennis, soccer, cricket and squash. Probe Malhotra a little more and names of people belonging to this elite 'unemployed' club will pop out. He has either bumped into them in Bangalore or heard of them.

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Ramesh Ramanathan, a former Citibanker from London, and a finance whiz is now busy helping urban local bodies set their house in order. Not only is his service gratis, he even funds some activities himself. But to make these bodies accountable, he is creating a grass roots citizens' movement called Janaagraha.

Srikant Nadhamuni, a techie who has worked in Sun Microsystems in the Silicon Valley, is now helping build e-governance frameworks. His service too is gratis. Not surprisingly, Bangalore is teeming with professionals with experience in building institutions who can now afford to spend all their time doing just what they strongly believe in. And that has begun to make a difference to the city.

But it is not just Bangalore that is witness to this phenomenon. In 1994, Chennai-based Vivek Reddy became the chief executive (CEO) of Kothari Pioneer, India's first private mutual fund, when he had just turned 30. He even got an equity stake. Almost a decade on, Templeton bought over the Kothari Pioneer Fund and Reddy is out of a job. "All I do now is play tennis and work out in the gym," says Reddy, who still has fire in his belly. "They did not even retain the name of the fund which we created," he says. Clearly, Reddy is waiting for his calling. He has to leave something behind. Meanwhile, his family of four can sustain a lifestyle that will cost about Rs 3 lakh a month. It can go up to Rs 15 lakh a month on contingencies.

While Reddy is waiting for something to excite him, 34-year-old Ashish Rajpal has found his mission. He has put himself through an education degree at Harvard-we would call it teacher's training-and is now CEO of iDiscoveri, a company that he and friends from XLRI started in 1996. He takes home a salary of a few tens of thousands, but then his trip is different. The education bug has bitten him and he thinks children should learn life skills in the outdoors. His wife Renu Rajpal, who is also involved in iDiscoveri, is putting herself through a mountaineering course.

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Rajpal should have some conviction to do what he is doing. His career is an FMCG marketer's dream. His CV reads-product manager of P&G's fastest growing brand Ariel in 1992, brand manager in Moscow of a beer called Viking in 1994, and the global marketing head for French food giant Danone in Paris at 30. It also helps that all this has enabled Rajpal save enough to put his kids through college.

While Rajpal wants to help children build better rounded personalities, Ranjan Pal, in neighbouring Gurgaon wants to create an atmosphere forthe suburb's yuppie adults. While he is not playing golf or squash, he is hatching plans to build an art and culture club. Pal, a former World Bank researcher and a Jardine Fleming economist, headed back home in 1997 to head an equity research firm. He was then the first executive director of the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. Now he is a founder of SmartAnalyst, a firm that dreams of doing financial research for global companies remotely. But that does not seem to occupy too much of his time. He had enough time to do a 200-km run down the Brahmaputra on a raft. "I'm committed to myself now," chuckles Pal.

Such stories of men in India opting out of a mindless rat race are still uncommon. "The first question that people pop in a social gathering is 'Where do you work?'" says Reddy.

But the trend is definitely there. "Women have been opting out for years, today, they will be able to support the family in his alternate lifestyle," says Sonal Agrawal, Director Accord group, a search firm. So men, too, can now take the chill pill.