Last weekend I got myself tickets for a movie called Up in the Air. A typical American drama film directed by Jason Reitman and co-written by Reitman and Sheldon Turner, the film is an adaptation of the 2001 novel of the same name, written by Walter Kirn. Apart from the fact that the film stars the ever charming George Clooney, what all the more interested me was a brief review that I read which mentioned that the story is about a corporate downsizer and his travels.

Corporate downsizing? For those who thought laying off or firing employees is a HR executive's prerogative, here's food for thought. While introducing his character Ryan Bingham, Clooney says that for every boss who finds the whole act of firing people and that too in bulk quite ghastly and thinks he isn't that professionally equipped to do so, there's people like him - the corporate downsizer. And so the smooth talking Bingham goes about with his business, traveling across the length and breadth of the USA and firing hundreds and sometimes multiples of hundreds in a matter of few days. Interestingly, he prefers an isolated life and spends 90 per cent of the days in a year traveling by air. He is a loyalty program addict and one of his long term and most cherished goals is to collect 10 million air miles!

Coming back to downsizing, before the economic reforms stepped into India, Indian companies and their employees mostly believed in lifetime employment. Taking up my father's example who has spent all his life in the private sector, his last 30 years of employment were spent in one single company! However, with the Indian economy making its presence felt in the global scenario and with competition between companies heating up, top bosses were forced to take notice and go for some amount of pruning. What came of this were schemes like voluntary retirement schemes (VRS), deferred recruitments and benching of people. However, there still exists limited knowledge and expertise in mass downsizing in the sub-continent.

Said that and given a situation which now isn't as lucrative as the recent slowdown but yet is laden with whiffs of caution - how about considering a job or starting off a firm that offers expert services of corporate downsizing?