Finding the funny in outsourcing

From Berkeley, where he runs a consulting company, he's the middleman between U.S. clients who need software and workers in India who write the code. He's a beneficiary of corporate America's rush to tap relatively cheap skilled foreign labor, profiting as he seamlessly hands off tasks like a baton as the globe turns.

Or not so seamlessly. The world isn't flat, Sood says. "The world is still round and lumpy."

The miscommunications rooted in cultural and time differences can be frustrating, and amusing. And so a cartoon strip called "Doubtsourcing" was born.

Set mostly in an office in India, "Doubtsourcing" aims to be to the outsourcing world what "Dilbert" has been to the U.S. cubicle set. Making fun of Indian workaholism in one cartoon, a job candidate receives an offer after boasting that he hasn't "seen the sun for 7.5 months."

In another, a U.S. manager criticizes the India team for being slow and uncreative. An Indian worker says the U.S. firm has changed its business model three times in three months, from online dating to insurance to pornography. "You just need to deal with ambiguity better," the U.S. manager says.

Sood says that though "there's a lack of humor in the outsourcing industry," he finds it very funny.

Once, on a trip to India, he met three times with an American potential client who refused to tell him what company he was from, no doubt, Sood says, because outsourcing can be so politically charged in the U.S.

In India, the view of the "big bad client" in America is Wizard of Oz-like, Sood says. The desire to please the mysterious boss and avoid conflict leads to problems, he adds, which of course are fodder for "Doubtsourcing."

By the way, "Doubtsourcing" is outsourced. Sood writes the dialogue and a friend in China illustrates it. Sood started posting the cartoon strip late last year and now has 30,000 subscribers, one-fourth in India.

The strip is hitting a nerve. A recent item about "Doubtsourcing" on the blog TechCrunch led to a gripe session#comments.

A fan from India e-mailed Sood asking him to give American companies more knocks. There are "numerous instances when the outsourcing company would expect us to be illiterate idiots, whereas we managed to show them a thing or two," the fan wrote. "Other times, we were on time for a call at 4 a.m. while the outsourcing rep was busy changing nappies of his kid."