Towards a flatter world...

As I was browsing through the book, 'The World is Flat' by Thomas Friedman, that talks about the amazing way in which the technological innovations were making communication so very easy that the world appeared flat without barriers, I began recollecting some of my experiences as an Indian, who stood as witness as it unfolded right before my eyes. Here is a slice of my journey towards a Flat World.

I stared out of the window into the unkempt, large garden, with thick undergrowth, and lovely jackfruit trees. It was a cold day, with the white light from the clouds creating the setting from a British movie 'Pride and Prejudice'. But, I was in a gloom.
It was not because of the clouds.
It was a Sunday in the winter of late 80s, and the day of the 'Heman and the Masters of the Universe' [a very popular cartoon TV series in the late 80s in India]. I was at my grandpa's place in Honnavar, an important coastal town in Karnataka, and it had no television sets then.
This was what I loathed about going on a vacation. No 'Heman' at nine, and no 'Mickey and Donald' at ten.
I remembered the attractive TV advertisements that I had seen of 'EC TV', in Bangalore. Though there were other brands, such as 'Videocon' and 'BPL', EC TV appeared like an inexpensive brand, which my calculative grandpa could be convinced to buy. A little afraid to propose this idea directly, I had scribbled 'Why not buy a EC TV' in Kannada, and left it at the dinner table.
I can still remember the roar of laughter that emerged from the dining room when my parents and grandparents sat for lunch.
'Hrrmmph', I had said to myself, 'these elders will never spend a paise for us.'

On an August day of 2006, I logged into 'Orkut', the most popular site amongst the young, and the most hated site by corporate firewalls. I had got a friend request from 'Pachchi'. I was confused. All the Prasannas (who become Pachchi for their close friends) that I knew were known by different petnames. There was only one Prasanna who was Pachchi that I knew. He was from my native village amidst the Western Ghats. Two years back, this village had no proper telephones, with the few houses that did, needed to have an incandescent bulb kept at a very close proximity to the instrument, without which the instrument would die of cold.
Pachchi had not only gotten hold of a computer, but had browsed the Internet enough to get to know about Orkut, and sent a friend request!!!
Gawd!!! Forget about the two digit growth of economy, this was more astonishing.
Soon he would stumble against a Brazilian woman interested in Indian culture, and due to his religious upbringing, would launch into a Gyan Transfer about Indian scriptures to her.
The Internet was flattening the world at a fast pace.

The Internet was an enigma to me in the summer of '98. I had just met up with a friend of mine the other evening, who was boasting of a 'Hotmail Account' that he had opened for free. I had never used a Windows machine, and was totally ignorant about what the 'Hotmail Account' was.
I did not even have an idea about what the 'Internet' looked like.
A recent article in a local magazine had great words to speak about the new phenomenon called the 'Internet'. As this was somewhere related to the Computers, and as I was a Software Engineer aspirant, I decided to read the article. In there, I was introduced to the concept of URL. I wrote down the URLs like nationalgeographic.com, readersdigest.com mentioned there.
I called up my friend with the 'Hotmail Account' and got the directions from him to go to the 'Yahoo Cafe', which was one of the first few Internet cafes in Bangalore. I pulled another friend of mine to join me to check this new invention.
As we followed the directions to 'Yahoo Cafe', we moved through small lanes, and dirty roads. Finally, we saw a new board sporting 'Yahoo Cafe', on the first floor of a dilapidated building. I was upset. How could they not treat this new invention with respect? How could they have it accessible at such a run down place?

'Two Hundred rupees for one year membership, four hundred rupees for life membership," uttered a spectacled young man behind a flaking table of the Yahoo Cafe.
"What is the cost for using Internet for non-members?" I asked him.
"Eighty rupees for non-members. But only sixty rupees for members," he smiled.
"I will use it now. I will become a member next week," I told him.
"Your wish," he shrugged, as he directed us to a dark, damp room, with eight computers.
He clicked on an icon on a computer, which opened up a window, and then he went away.
As my friend stared at me, not sure what to do, I pulled out the paper with URLs with a broad smile. My article had empowered me on the Internet.
I typed 'Readerdigest.com' and the site opened. I read through the site for a few minutes. Then I typed 'NationalGeographic.com' and the site opened. It was a very basic site, with minimal pictures. We read through that. Then, I did not know what to do. It was just ten minutes, and we had fifty more minutes to go.
INTERNET WAS BORING.
"I am told that there are some sites that you can search, using Yahoo.com,” my friend said.
I typed 'Yahoo.com' on the URL. The Yahoo homepage appeared. We saw a place to type the subject, and a 'Search' button by its side. Now, what could we search for on the Internet?
My friend typed "Shah Rukh Khan" and clicked on the Search button. It was irritatingly slow, and after a minute of blank white screen, some links appeared. My friend clicked on one of them. After one more frustrating minute of blank white screen, the site began to load on the screen. Suddenly, we saw a picture of an attractive woman on one of the sides of the web page, with a 'Want me? Click Here' statement highlighted. My friend clicked on that. Another screen popped up. One link led to another, and we had more than twenty windows opened up. It was now very, very slow, and did not respond for almost five minutes. It was a mess out there.
We did not know how to close the windows!!!
I suggested that we call the person to close the windows.
"Are you out of your mind? How can we let him see all these windows?” my friend said frantically.
We waited for five more minutes. We were in there for almost an hour now. I took the courage to go up to the young man behind the table, and told him that we were done. As he came up to the computer, and began closing the windows, I observed how he was doing it, meanwhile getting embarrassed with all the content of the windows.
We came back home with a decision, never to waste our money on Internet again.

Later at home, "Internet is boring," I told Ravi, my friend who was like a tech-guru to me.
"Why?" he asked.
"Pah! I surfed the Net for one hour, it was so boring," I said in disgust, and added, "Wasted eighty rupees."
"Arre," he said, "You don't know how glorious the Internet is. I went to a site that was hosting movies. I saw that they were showing 'DDLJ'." DDLJ was a blockbuster Hindi movie of the mid-nineties. Though, now I realize that he was bluffing, because this was an era when the Internet was so slow that each byte appeared to come to India through Air India, the bluff did create a renewed interest in me towards the Internet.

Few days later, I chanced upon a book on Netscape Navigator. As I browsed through the book, I became aware of the power of Internet, and its numerous possibilities.

A month later, I had the occasion to meet up cousin of mine, a newly married Software Engineer from California, who visited us with his wife. In the process of showing off my intellect on Internet, and associated technologies, I blurted out everything that I remembered from the book on Netscape Navigator. He listened to me with keen interest.
Then I asked him, "A lot of data is said to be 'floating' around on the Net. What do you mean by 'floating' around? It should be stored somewhere, right?"
"Actually, yes. It is stored in some place," he said after a moment of silence, not very sure of his answer.
"But, Internet is said to uncontrollable by Governments, and private people. If the data is all stored in a place, don't you think the Government of that country will get an upper hand on the whole of the world?" was my sincere question to him.
He thought for a moment. He thought for almost a minute, which was a pretense that he was trying to make sense out of my question.
Then he said, "Actually, I do not deal with Internet technologies, but I am told that it is stored in Holland."
"Why Holland? Don't you think that Holland will get the power over the Internet if all the data on the Internet is stored in that country?"
"Actually, though it is stored in Holland, their Government does not know that it is stored there," he said.
Actually, he did not know anything about it. But, it did leave me thinking, that when the Holland Government comes to know that all the data on the Internet is stored in its country, it is going to become the Superpower of the world.



(Thank you for visiting my page..... Watch this space tomorrow for the concluding part......)