Cassidy: Engineering a new dance step

INTEL ENGINEER FROM INDIA STRIKES WORK-LIFE BALANCE, AND IN THE PROCESS CREATES A NEW GENRE: HINDI/SALSA

By Mike Cassidy, Mercury News Columnist
POSTED: 07/29/2008 01:32:27 AM

For most guys, being a reliability engineer for Intel would be excitement enough – thrilling days of pondering gates, amplifiers and clock speeds.

But not Giju John. Maybe it’s the show bizzy name – Giju – but somehow this chip dude knew he was born to sing and dance.

“I had my dream,” says John, 33, whose first name is pronounced Gee-ju.

But how many dreamers make it? How many cut a CD or join a renowned salsa dance group? Especially how many kids from Thiruvananthapuram, India?

So, John is keeping his day job. After all, he worked hard to get it. John came to the United States in 1998 and enrolled at the University of South Florida.

When he received his master’s degree in electrical engineering he moved to Silicon Valley because that’s what electrical engineers did.”That was the boom time, right?”

John was young and single and he did what young and single people do, including hitting the dance clubs, like Club Miami in downtown San Jose. He stumbled upon the flashy salsa dancers there – something new to him.

“At that point,” John says, “my objective was I wanted to dance like those people.”

He started taking lessons – two, three, four nights a week. And he was good, a regular dancing machine.

Some of his instructors were affiliated with Salsamania, a fledgling Bay Area dance group. The group needed a guy with John’s chops.

He was in.John regularly traveled the country with the group. Yes, he held down his day job, making sure the Intel inside would actually do what it was supposed to.

“It’s a good work/life balance for me,” he says.

John loved making microchips tick, but he loved his dancing, too. He remembered the Indian dance steps he learned as a boy. He noodled around, adding them to salsa steps and coming up with his own Hindi/salsa genre. He’s left Salsamania for a solo career.

Yes, a Hindi/salsa solo career. Why not? John was in Silicon Valley – a place with a prominent Latino population and tens of thousands of Indians and Indo-Americans. He produced a CD, “Rang Rangeeli Yeh Duniya,” (roughly translated: “This Colorful World,” a song about living life to its fullest). It is a CD of Hindi language songs set to the pulse of salsa, cha-cha and rap. He shot a music video. He launched a start-up, Beyond Dreamz, to produce his music.

And he continued to focus on the reliability of the next generation of Intel chips.

In February, John spent five weeks traveling through India offering Hindi/salsa dance workshops and promoting the genre and himself. But he didn’t take vacation.

“During the day I’d go around and do my salsa workshops,” he says, “at night I’d log onto my network.” He says his bosses are very understanding.

It’s one of the things about Silicon Valley. This place not only encourages people to reach for the impossible in technology. It opens up avenues. It shrugs “why not?” at ideas that might seem crazy elsewhere.

A Hindi/salsa singing chip engineer? Sure. Dance by day, chips by night? Of course.

And so Giju John takes to the dance floor with his back straight, chest out, hips swinging. He moves across the floor like a shark gliding through water. He’s the kind of tall, dark and handsome that destroys the stereotype of the pocket-protector nerd who repairs his thick glasses with Scotch tape.

John is realistic. Engineer, remember? He knows making a career as a song and dance man – even a Hindi/salsa man – is a long shot. But he’s going to give himself every chance.

Last week he headed back to India, this time on a sabbatical. He plans to spend three months in India shooting two music videos and performing, including at an international salsa convention in Bangalore.

It could be the springboard to the big time. If not, there’s always that chip thing.