India: Its size, its people, its coming of age.
At the GSMA press meet held on Tuesday here in New Delhi, it seemed like the industry body had discovered India only yesterday. The Indian telecom market has been growing at very impressive rates for over a decade now.
I am no social media addict. But when I read about our Prime Minister Manmohan Singh acquiring a Twitter handle (@PMOIndia), I logged on to my Twitter account and started following him.
I have never had a pleasant experience at a government office--be it getting a property registered or having to procure a birth or death certificate.There are several things I have disliked at these offices--the way the citizens are treated, the presence of touts, the dingy filthy offices, and the fact that these offices only left me more disillusioned about the state of affairs in my motherland.
Kapil Sibal, India's telecom minister, this week appears to have drawn more attention with his proposal to pre-filter the content on social media Web sites than all the publicity he got for some of the good work he did in the area of education. The hashtag #IdiotKapilSibal emerged as one of India's most tweeted on Tuesday.
Shifting into a new home is never too easy. Especially if you choose to shift during Diwali time when suddenly everyone gets too busy, starting from the carpenters to the plumbers, electricians and painters, and it gets difficult to convince them to do your work first.
For long, I have stuck to dated gadgetry--be it cell phones, laptops or music players or any other white good for that matter. It's much of a personality trait--I always choose comfort over style; including clothing and accessories.
All across the globe, governments are embracing technology and e-government projects in the hope that these would bring about efficiencies and reduce corruption. But I am really not sure if this is happening in India.
Earlier this month, there was news of a Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) student getting duped of US$6,667 (INR 3,00,000) in an e-mail scam. The fraud started when the student received an e-mail from an organization that called itself the Global Watch Institute, inviting him to attend two seminars it was holding--one in New York and the other in Madrid--on the same subject: Racism and Human Rights.
A (belated) happy new year to all readers of Inside India. 2010 was a peculiar year--it's been termed as the year of scams.
Over the last few months, the Indian media has had a spate of controversies and scams to report on, starting from the Indian Premier League (IPL), to the Commonwealth Games, the Adarsh Society scams and the scandal around allocation of 2G licenses in 2008.Perhaps I'm stating the obvious--corruption thrives on opaqueness.