Author: Samar Halarnkar
Publisher: Books Today
Year: 2002
Language: English
Pages: 232
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8187478381
Description
This book is about the Internet's successes and failures. It is about the stealthy change that the Internet revolution is engendering in Indian cities, towns, even villages. These are stories of fortune and flameouts from India's Internet revolution.
The The internet frenzy is dead, the hype is over. Yet the Internet craze did sweep India, as it did the rest of the world, through all of 1999 and 2000. Venture capitalists waved their billions (dollars, not rupees), and for a while a wave of brash entrepreneurs took over billboards, column inches and popular imagination. Much of the dot com craze was a mirage, but the technology and the spirit of freedom it generated were very real.
This book is about the Internet's successes and failures. It is about the stealthy change that the Internet revolution is engendering in Indian cities, towns, even villages. Against a rich backdrop of tradition and technology, it tells the stories of ordinary people who are beginning to believe. The stories are as diverse as India itself: a Mumbai college dropout-turned-CEO who flourishes after the great tech crash; and illiterate farmer in the heart of Madhya Pradesh who uses the Internet to activate the village hand pump; a village boy from Karnataka whose tech ideas attract multimillion-dollar international funding.
The Internet is vastly more than web sites and dot comes. These are equally stories about a technology that is disrupting our world, often without our knowledge. It switches with ease between narratives about ration cards and quantum computing. It is journey through the technologies changing the world around us. It is also an exploration of how inner selves - our attitudes, even our handwriting - are being transformed by the myriad tentacles of the Internet.