Newest articles on The Sacramento Press tagged as "india"

Ali Mackani: Cultivating possibilities

2010-12-15T02:09:56Z

Ali Mackani has made a career out of developing potential.

As a computer science engineer at Intel, people came to him with ideas and asked how to make them work. Mackani usually found a way.

In 2002, the Folsom resident and partners brought Sacramento a bit of high-tech fame by creating the first large-scale outdoor wireless fidelity or "wi-fi" network.

He created a buzz on Capitol Mall, where he opened his first restaurant, 55 Degrees. He then opened a bar, Lounge on 20, that anchors one of the trendiest corners in Midtown, 20th and K streets.

Now a team led by this ambitious 40-year-old entrepreneur is a top contender to develop a new arena in Sacramento. That possibility has left some wondering who Mackani is and how he got here.

"I'm not the guy that sits on the sidelines," Mackani said in an interview last week.

The road to this place has had interesting twists and turns, from the bustling streets of Shiraz, Iran, and the urban sea of humanity that is Mumbai, India, to Kansas and Northern California.

Mackani was born in 1970 in Iran, the oldest of four children. His entrepreneurial father operated an electrical supply store and a small restaurant in Shiraz. After the Islamic Revolution in 1979, his family sent him to live with relatives in India for a year. But he wasn’t comfortable in that country.

In 1984, Mackani's mother took all four children to live with family in San Jose, where resources and opportunities were better than India or Iran.

"They wanted to create a better life for us," he said.

His mother, who'd never worked outside the home, was suddenly working three jobs to put a roof over their heads. The 14-year-old Mackani got a job the first day he arrived to help his mother support the family. The only English they knew was "yes" and "no."

Their father stayed in Iran and was never able to provide financial support to the family.

"There are times I wish I had a father figure in my life," Mackani said. "I've been the father figure for my family, my siblings, since we moved here.

"Life does strange things. It depends on what you do with it and how you accept it," he said.

The family moved to Bay City, Mich., for a year and a half before settling in a very low-income duplex in Wichita, Kan. They learned English quickly on the job, in school and watching TV. Mackani grew his hair as long as he could to help him fit in and worked eight hours five to six days a week in restaurants. He did homework before school and at lunchtime.

"When you're in a survivor mode, you get things done," he said.

A typing class at Wichita Southeast High School led him to his career path. Fascinated by the IBM electronic typewriter, Mackani opened the machine and found "Intel" stamped on what was then a huge microprocessor. His teacher told him about the equipment and the two companies that made it. Mackani was so intrigued, he decided he wanted to study computer science in college and work for Intel.

After graduating high school in 1988, he put himself through Wichita State University. He initially worked at restaurants, then started a floor cleaning and buffing business at age 19 with $875 from an uncle. He recouped the loan the first week and cleaned floors two to three nights a week throughout the rest of college.

In his senior year, Mackani got his foot in the door at Intel doing research and a final report for a college project on motherboard transistor automation. He returned to Intel as a contractor after graduating from college in 1992. Two years later, he was hired full-time as a hardware and software engineer.

At Intel, Mackani said he was encouraged to learn, grow and change. He had a rare combination of engineering smarts and business sense. Mackani used that combination to help Intel find ways to create working business models for different types of technology.

He helped Intel integrate Internet use as an internal tool in the 1990s. He also developed an internal “human factors engineering” process to help build technology to better fit humans after working with an outside firm hired to do that for several Intel products.

Mackani was the director of human factors engineering for Intel when he left in 2002 to pursue his idea for the wi-fi network with support from Intel and Cisco.

But Mackani also left because he said he had an intense desire to take control of his future and use more of his creative energy. The same fear of losing control that had kept him from drinking and getting high with friends in high school pushed him to work for himself, he said.

"Those who are entrepreneurs – they really want the opportunity to showcase their abilities or try new things," he said. "It's very hard to do that in the corporate world."

Through his company, Corporate Information Exchange (CIE), Mackani provided high-tech consultation services to mid-sized companies and explored new technology and investment opportunities. He was a silent partner in two Folsom restaurants.

His first exposure to politics and Sacramento city government came in 2004, when CIE bid on a city project to implement wi-fi throughout Sacramento. The city gave the contract to a bigger company charging more but promising revenue to the city. The project failed, Mackani said.

"When the big boys come to town, they're not always the best option," he said.

When they’re not working, Mackani and his wife, Intel employee Lisa Watts, enjoy entertaining friends at their Folsom home.

He's also involved in local philanthropy. He and their children – Imani, 7, and Darioush, 9 – will appear this weekend in Pamela Hayes Classical Ballet's production of "The Nutcracker." Mackani has practiced three months for his role as the Mouse King. In May, he'll join two other local celebrities to impersonate the band Three Dog Night and sing at a benefit for My Sister's House at the Crest Theatre.

His love of food, wine and entertaining, and his restaurant background, led him to open his first restaurant in 2005. He recruited a New York chef and opened 55 Degrees at 555 Capitol Mall, at the start of what appeared to be a development boom for Capitol Mall.

Mackani and others thought development on the mall would help revitalize downtown. He said he still thinks the Capitol Mall is sort of the “Champs-Elysées” of Sacramento.

But the failure of John Saca's towers at 301 Capitol Mall and the Aura tower at 601 Capitol Mall, as well as the recession, hurt the restaurant, which he closed in late 2008, he said.

"Was it a little ahead of itself? Was it a little risky at the time for our city? Absolutely,” Mackani said. "In business, you have to learn not everything is going to go your way.”

He opened his next business, Lounge on 20, in summer 2008. The sleek, chic bar with artisan cocktails and gourmet fare has gained a loyal following.

Mackani believes in himself and his ideas enough that he took Mayor Kevin Johnson's request for proposals to build a new arena seriously. He'd already started talking about the arena with local developers before Johnson made the request last year.

Mackani knew he didn't have all the resources and expertise to pull it off himself. So he put together a team called the CORE and submitted what he considered a worthy proposal.

His idea to develop an arena at Westfield Downtown Plaza showed enough promise that the mayor’s task force ranked it as one of the top-three proposals last spring. And two task force members, real estate attorney Mike Kvarme and developer Larry Kelley, president of McClellan Park, left the task force and joined Mackani's team last month.

The proposal is being updated and may look very different when resubmitted to the city by Dec. 30. But it'll likely reflect what Mackani has created for himself in Sacramento: a niche seizing opportunities others may not see and taking them as far as he can – helping to develop the city's potential while at the same time developing his own.

"You never want to ask (later), 'Did I do everything I could do?' " he said.

Tollywood movie shoots in Sac

2010-12-08T03:13:17Z

An Indian film company spent some time in Sacramento recently shooting scenes for a love story, with Capitol Mall standing in for the streets of San Francisco and Placerville standing in for Brazil.

Wide Angle Creations is a production company based in South India, whose film industry, Tollywood, is the counterpart to North India's Bollywood.

The company came to Sacramento to work on the film "180," which features Siddharth and Priya Anand. Siddharth, who goes only by his first name, is also in Disney's first Southern Indian movie "Once Upon a Warrior."

In "180," he stars as a successful San Francisco-area doctor who falls in love, marries and encounters trials and tribulations in life.

Like many Indian movies, "180" is a musical romance. Some of the singing may have happened in Sacramento, but Kris Hemenway, a line producer for the movie, couldn't go into too much detail.

"They have done little pieces of song just about everywhere they've gone," Hemenway said Tuesday.

Scenes have been shot in India and Malaysia. But the film takes place mainly in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The name Tollywood is said to predate Bollywood and was reportedly coined in 1932 by an American engineer who introduced talkies to India. “Tollywood” was his name for the budding film industry located in Tollygunge, a suburb of Calcutta or Kolkata in West Bengal.

In the same way that Kolkata is exotic to U.S. residents, California is mysterious and alluring to those living in India.

In addition to the Bay Area, other Northern California cities and the region’s natural beauty are also highlighted, from honeymoon scenes shot in South Lake Tahoe to rescue scenes shot on the American River in Coloma.

"We're kind of their exotic locations," Hemenway said. "They shot from San Francisco to South Lake Tahoe and probably got (some of the most) beautiful places on the planet."

The movie is set for release early next year in Tamil, Telugu and English in theaters in India and the United States.

Sacramento's Capitol Mall plays a pivotal role at the start of the movie. On Nov. 28, a quiet Sunday after Thanksgiving, Sacramento Police closed down the entire mall and the crew set up wrecked cars and police cars for a car accident scene where the movie's lead woman meets the doctor she later marries.

The accident allegedly takes place in San Francisco, and the Emerald Tower at 300 Capitol Mall doubles as the woman's workplace. The director really liked the look of Capitol Mall and the striking fall colors there, Hemenway said.

The production company chose to shoot some scenes in Sacramento and El Dorado County because of the locations themselves and because the people here are so friendly, Hemenway said.

"Sacramento PD - they are phenomenal," said Lucy Steffens, head of the Sacramento Film Commission. "They are one of our best resources when it comes to filming."

At least 50 to 70 extras were used here. Cast and crew returned to Sacramento last Saturday to shoot scenes in the Old City Cemetery. Cast and crew dined in Target's parking lot. The director worked hard to keep nearly 40 Sacramento County Jail inmates and their orange jumpsuits out of camera range while they worked in the cemetery, Steffens said.

Many scenes were shot throughout El Dorado County. Various locations there have appeared in dozens of movies, including a river scene in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom." The area has stood in for more exotic locations at other times as well, with Highway 50 posing as Europe's Autobahn in car commercials and Placerville depicted as Japan in "Memoirs of a Geisha," said Kathleen Dodge, executive director of the El Dorado Lake Tahoe Film & Media Office.

Placerville was a strong candidate for location shooting for the recent movie "Knight and Day" starring Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, but the crew shot those scenes in the Los Angeles area instead, Dodge said.

So perhaps it's not such a stretch to hear that historic downtown Placerville is playing Brazil in "180." Other scenes were shot in a private home, Chuck's Restaurant in Placerville, El Dorado Hills Town Center and more.

"We're all complaining about how our money's leaving the country," Dodge said. "Here's a situation where we're bringing money in from another country. It doesn't get any better than that."

Photo of Old City Cemetery by Chris Fryer. Photo of 300 Capitol Mall by Suzanne Hurt, a staff reporter for The Sacramento Press.

Inside out-sourcing

2009-01-08T22:49:40Z

It’s one thing to read in the local paper about the outsourcing of jobs abroad, to India, to the Philippines, and it’s quite another thing to have it happen to you. And if you happen to work for the local paper, well...

The Sacramento Bee, under enormous fiscal pressure, is finding some unique ways to cut costs, from offering buy-outs to a hefty percentage of the people who write and edit the paper, to outsourcing the work of the people who design advertising, and currently, to the people who have, for decades, kept track of where the money goes.

The money is going to India. That’s the big story. It doesn’t seem right, but it adds up for The Bee’s parent company, McClatchy, which is desperate to avoid sinking out of sight altogether as its stock price plummets and circulation drops at its newspapers. The logic of the market is brutal.

But the little story is sadder, and more interesting, and it’s happening right here in midtown Sacramento, just blocks from where I write. Right now, a handful of eager young Indians from the city of Jaipur are getting the chance of a lifetime: They are spending their days at 21st and Q Streets, learning how to do the jobs of people who live in Sacramento, people who, come March 1 or thereabouts, will join the ranks of the local unemployed.

I spoke with Lanny Shay, a Bee employee for the last 18 years, who is currently doing the appalling task of training the people who will soon take his job back to India.

We could discuss the rightness or wrongness of this, but Shay himself says he understands the financial logic. And we could talk about the money that McClatchy is saving, and thereby, perhaps, saving our hometown newspaper. We could talk about the money that Shay and his soon-to-be-former co-workers will NOT be spending at the Tower Theatre and the Co-op and the Pine Cove and Cafe Bernardo and perhaps even on things advertised in The Bee’s shrinking classifieds.

Instead, we’ll just let Shay - who says he has a masters degree in finance from Stanford - talk for a bit about what he is seeing, and feeling, as he presides over his own obsolescence.

Basically, you have to train the person who’s taking your job. So if you do everything that’s asked of you, work long hours, do overtime, the best you can hope for is...you lose your job. My manager is trying to keep that in mind, but I think they lose sight of that. It’s weird.

I work in finance, accounting. On Sept. 14, they called six of us in and explained that the jobs were being outsourced to India. Our jobs are going to Jaipur. They’re jobs as finance clerk, accounting clerk, credit clerk, it’s a smattering of positions. All six people whose jobs are going do different things.

First, in mid-November, we had a number of people come to do discovery, to lay out the mapping of the jobs, what the jobs are, what they entail, how they’re done. Then, in December, the people who are going to be doing the jobs, or will be training the people in India who will be doing the jobs, came for 3-5 weeks. There were four the first time, and four or five of them the second time.

They’re all very young - the average age is, I’d say, 23. The project manager I have less interaction with, she’s early 30s, but the others are young. They actually are pretty rural. I don’t know what level of education they have, but none of them has a car or can drive, most of them live at home with their families, and at least one had the equivalent of a CPA. I’m guessing that some might have college degrees, but I don’t know.

They speak great English. Their written English is kinda stilted, but it’s far better than my Hindi will ever be. All they do is work. They’re staying in a Residence Inn or something somewhere outside of midtown, and every morning they show up at The Bee, then work with us the whole day, then they stay until 7 or 8 at night, after we’ve left, and then they cab back to the hotel. And I have the distinct impression that they work until they go to sleep. This group has been here for five weeks, and one or two weekends they may have gotten out to SF or Tahoe, but mostly, they work. I don’t know how much they’ll make for doing our jobs in India.

It’s frustrating, there are communication issues. They’re exceedingly polite, and totally avoid conflict, which is a cultural thing. There are times when you have to push them, and often, you have to stop and say, “Repeat what I just told you.” Because they’ll act as though they understand, even if they don’t. But they’re really nice kids, and work really hard.

At some point, there’s going to be some sort of anger about it, but at this point, we’re still working. I’m certainly not mad at the kids from India, this is probably the best chance they’ve had for a job, and it’s not their fault that it’s taking my job away. And realistically, it’s not my bosses’ fault either, I think my boss feels terrible about it. One of the people who is being replaced has been there more than 40 years. I’ve been there 18. Someone else has been there 26.

So, who do you get angry at? I haven’t really figured that out yet. It’s bad that it has to happen during the worst economy in 60 years, but it’s just one of those things. It’s just the way America works now. The people who make bad decisions that effect hundreds or thousands of lives pay no price at all for making those decisions. For all the talk of the “culture of responsibility,” we’re at the point where you can do everything right and potentially lose everything. And you can make disastrous decisions and retire with a $30 million golden parachute.

There have been times in the past when I thought I could work somewhere else and get paid more, but I like living and working downtown, and The Bee’s been here for 150 years. I figured that if I got to work every day and did a good job, I’d retire comfortably. Now we’re at the point where, is anyone’s job safe? I don’t know this for a fact, but if this outsourcing is successful, other things at The Bee that can be outsourced, will be outsourced.

They’ve outsourced circulation customer service, they’ve outsourced the classified phone bank, and now us. Which is funny, because the thing we had that craigslist didn’t have was really good customer service. So what did we do to compete with craigslist? We gave away customer service! To me, that doesn’t make a whole lotta sense.

Supposedly, March 1 will be the date we turn everything over. The people go back to India, they ramp up and start doing more and more of the work, and then I’m checking it to make sure it’s alright from my side, and then I’m out of a job. In a really horrible economy. But I can collect unemployment, I have skills, and they’re giving us severance packages. But I never thought I’d have to look for work.

And the sad part is, I believe in newspapers. I believe that there’s a good reason why freedom of the press is in the First Amendment and the right to bear arms is in the Second. I believe in media telling the truth to power. And watching the industry sink is really sad. As much as I love Huffington Post and Real Clear Politics, I take with a grain of salt everything I read on the web. I don’t see how websites can compete with real newspapers doing real journalism. Maybe it’s the permanency of ink: It’s real. If you put it on your blog and it’s wrong, you delete it and it’s like it was never said. I don’t know if the effort to get it right is there in electronic media the way it is, or was, in print media.

But I guess we’ll see.