In India, putting a child through engineering or medical college is, for many middle-class families, a life's mission in a way that is almost unknown in the United States. Though middle-class families in India have long steered their children into professions like engineering and medicine, the trend has taken off over the past decade. It's been spurred by the demand in the 1990s for software workers in the United States and other Western countries, and more recently by the phenomenon of outsourcing by Western multinationals to Indian shores. The growing demand for engineering and medicine is discussed in this article.