The odds against bagging the business deal were 10 is to one. There was one multi-million dollar business contract and plenty of takers. Shridhar Swami’s Bangalore-based software firm was a favoured front-runner for the job. Swami — the soundest technical brain in the company — had been rushed to California to broker the bargain.

Swami was to meet his prospective clients for dinner at a five-star rooftop restaurant. He had come dressed in his best brown suit for the evening. The bespectacled, serious-mannered software engineer had his facts and figures on his fingertips. He could speak software at length. But the art of chit-chat was not Swami’s forte.

When conversation shifted from software, the cyber geek fell silent. Dinner was served and Swami happily dug into the seven-course meal with a spoon. Knives and forks were not for him, for he found most cutlery too unwieldy to handle.

The business deal finally fell through and Swami couldn’t figure out why. Till he enrolled for a compulsory, company-sponsored personality grooming course in Bangalore. He learnt that software skills alone don’t swing business deals. Soft skills are a much-needed icing on the cake. And brown suits are the butt of many Indian-centric jokes in the West.

“Swami knew how to interact with his computer, not with people,” says Padmini Nagachandra, head of a Bangalore-based grooming school, the Academy for Corporate Excellence (ACE). She spruced up Swami’s personality when he enrolled for a week-long crash course on personality development, business etiquette and communication skills at ACE.

India’s cyber nerds are being expected to smarten up. Faded jeans and unshaven faces are no longer the trademarks of a true techie. Nor are clashing socks and shirts, indifferent suits or hair that stinks of pungent oil. As the Indian software industry goes global and woos foreign clients, computer geeks are being asked to pull up their (matching) socks.

Client-interface with international firms has become a vital part of a techie’s job. And this cannot be conducted in the typically-Indian suit-and-sneaker attire. Bangalore-based software major, Infosys, has made it mandatory for its employees to be dressed in formals twice a week.

“Western clients are as particular of dressing and decorum as of technical skills,” says Nagachandra. It’s important to walk the talk.Which means that Bangalore’s techies are looking at ways to polish their personalities. And grooming schools are willingly answering their prayers.

Grooming centres have become big business in Bangalore. Nagachandra insists that there is one new centre opening in every street. She was a housewife — with time on her hands and space in the garage — when she launched the Academy nine years ago. ACE was meant to have been a side activity for her.

Today, Nagachandra is busy getting a swanky, double-storeyed complex —all done in designer opaque glass and bright orange wrought iron — built to house her fast-expanding grooming school. She has a staff of 35 assistants and five trainers and claims to have conducted personality development courses in over 30 software firms in the city. “I have to refuse clients now,” she says.

It’s a repeat story at Sudhir Udayakanth’s Edge Academy. The 30-year-old trainer ran into a rough patch when he launched his grooming school three years ago. “Business was dull those days. I ran dry for a long time,” he says. But times have changed — and how. Udayakanth claims to have trebled his business in the last one year.

Udayakanth calls himself an Image Consultant. “I tutor techies on every fine point of corporate dressing,” he says. This includes instructions on which fingers to wear rings, how far down the tie should go, why not to buy belts that scream out their brand names and on the embarrassing shape that visiting cards take when kept in the hip pocket. The image guru can rattle off a list of typically-techie traits that desperately need to be abolished — the most rampant, he says, is the blue Reynolds pen cap peeping out of shirt pockets.

Country-specific dressing tips are an integral part of grooming courses. “In India, all clothes and colours work fine. Westerners are not so accommodating,” says Nagachandra. Every country follows unwritten, though strict, colour norms — so no bright colours in England and no yellows in the Middle East, please. India’s software champs are discovering that colour codes are as crucial to professional success as computer codes.

The get-groomed syndrome is spilling into Bangalore’s business schools as well. The People’s Education Society Institute of Technology (PESIT) — one of the city’s top B-schools — incorporated a personality development programme in its course curriculum last year. “We have to keep in tune with the times. In today’s world, first impressions are made in 15 seconds,” says a management professor at PESIT.

Bangalore’s Zeal Institute of Personal Development claims to have a steady inflow of software and management students signing up for its three-week long course. “We have 100-odd students training at the academy at any time,” says Anthony Williams, trainer and proprietor of the institute.

Students take their grooming sessions very seriously. A public speaking session is underway at the Zeal Institute and there is pindrop silence in class. The students have to give a 30-second speech on how they maintain a positive attitude. The trainer is shooting instructions from behind, “Be loud. Be clear. Move your hands.”

Young Deva gets behind the microphone and introduces himself. He then clears his throat and says, “I am required to be a Bill Gates, Bill Clinton and Dale Carnegie, all rolled into one. I must know my conversation codes and table manners as well as my technical skills. That’s not easy. But I look at the brighter side. At least I can be a jack of all trades if not king of one.”

There is a round of loud applause accompanied with enthusiastic cries of, “Hoo-haa”. This, the trainer explains, is supposed to act as a positive reinforcement for the speaker. It’s clear that the clapping and the accompanying sounds have given Deva a big boost. He’s grinning and red in the ears as he walks back to his chair. If all goes well, Deva will, one of these days, combine Clinton’s charm with Carnegie’s attitude. To say nothing of Gates’s salesmanship.