Come Back to Madras

I recently joined the Corporate Marketing team at Freshworks and I was taking my time to find my bearings in a new environment. You know, the usual pangs of adjusting to a new place and the craving for some old, known familiarity.

I spent time looking around, seeing what everyone else was doing, where I could help, and getting to know Freshworks better.

Amidst all this, one of the campaigns our video team was working on at the time was called Come Back to Madras. This was a recruitment campaign that urged all the people who had left their hometown to pursue their professional dreams, to come back home. Freshworks was here now, and they had avenues for great careers in their own part of the world.

Come-back-to-Madras. Those words immediately struck a chord with me. And here’s why.

After schooling in Calcutta, I had studied in Mumbai and Ahmedabad before moving up north to work in Delhi for a couple of years.

Upon arriving in Chennai, I realised that there was something oddly familiar about the city, that almost immediately resonated with the Calcuttan in me.

For starters, both cities were British settlements (pre-independence) and have a heavy colonial hangover. Interestingly, when Madras became Chennai, Calcutta followed suit a few years later and became Kolkata.

Be it their love for culture, their knowledge of languages or their passion for football — the cities share a unique bond. Not only does their diet comprise of similar taste, but Kolkata and Chennai also share similar intensities of humidity and heat!

But most importantly, while other metropolitan cities like Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai saw a phase of rapid development and expansion– pre and post liberalisation, Chennai and Kolkata chose a slower pace of growth. They chose a much more leisure way of life and the cities retained, fiercely at times — their old world charm.

However, something changed for Chennai in the last 8–10 years.

While Kolkata witnessed little or no growth, Chennai saw tectonic shifts in its software industry landscape. A large number of B2B SaaS product companies emerged from the city, attracting a massive customer base and turning the heads of investors. While Bangalore is still considered the Silicon Valley of India, Chennai has silently grown to become the SaaS capital of India.

In our CEO’s words, “Chennai has not been marketed as what it is, a Software-as-a-Service hotbed.”

While Zoho sowed the seeds of a the SaaS industry in Chennai, companies like Freshworks, Orangescape, Indix, Unmetric, Chargebee and many more helped Chennai’s SaaS industry become worth billions.

So here we are today, at Freshworks.

I’m sure there will be a slew of new companies coming up from under our umbrella too. This is what happens when a company begins to grow. It causes a ripple effect by helping the industry grow and that, in turn helps the city grow. The city begins to attract talent from all over the country. This gives an opportunity for the many who left their cities in search of jobs, to come back home once again.

This is why Come back to Madras holds a special place for me and I’m sure for a lot of us at Freshworks.

The campaign is a moment of glory for Freshworks. It is a matter of pride for the people who dreamt it and made it possible, as nothing could be more joyful than being able to give their people the opportunity to return to Chennai without having to sacrifice career goals and ambitions.

However, this is a distant dream for Kolkata. I hope that someday Kolkata will be able to provide me with similar opportunities or even better — that someday I will be able to provide the youth of Kolkata the opportunity to come back and help the city and it’s economy flourish. I am sure every Calcuttan living in any corner of the world has thought about it at some point and yearns to return home one day.

Till then, I shall celebrate Freshworks and its success. After all, I’m part of its journey now!