Travels: Thailand/India 1997

Travel Letter #3

Connecting is half the fun

Darjeeling, written April 19th, but sent from Delhi on May 14th, 1997

There is a saying, "going there is half the fun". Well, this business of writing you letters and having them send by Internet in more or less developed parts of Thailand and India, the process of finding a place to write, send and read, is half the fun of communicating. In Thailand we had the pleasure of taking part in the computer/Internet craze that is roaming like a huge tidewave over Southeast-Asia at the moment. Thailand is trying very hard to keep up with Malaysia, which is about to sail up as the leading computerized society in the world next to America. Even though Singapore are well underway to wire every home, school and business to a highspeed digital network, the planned projects in Malaysia are even exceeding this. In Thailand there are signs everywhere of an explosion in computer- and Internet-related activity. Newspapers and signboards are full of expensive courses in basic computer-knowledge, and connection points to Internet are popping up everywhere.

In India this trend will be even more exciting to observe. It's obvious that the country has a great computer-industry potential in its millions of highly skilled personel offering low-cost brainpower. This is already highly visible in Bangalore which has developed into a kind of night-shift Silicon Valley, picking up working projects when America and Europe goes to sleep. With Internet and other network it doesn't matter anymore if cooperating buisnesses is next door or around the globe. Even though the hardware is manufactured in high quantities at flawless quality and low cost, anyone who has been in India would know that the infrastructure could impose some severe challenges. As all Internet connections at some point is going through plain, old telecomm-wires, what happens in a country where any streched wire could fall on your head any time, and the telephone might go dead several times a day? The answers are not easy at hand, and India still have a lot of problems to overcome before it will be a full member of the cyber-community.

But mountains are surely moving. The three most visible changes in India since my last visit six years ago, which came first to my attention, can be epitomized in Tokyo Freaks, MacIndia, and HandyLingam. On the two first, I will return to later. On the last: The lingam is not anymore so much the original phallus of the god Shiva as the new omnipresent status symbol of the handyphone. It represents the influx of all kind of digital technology and lifestyles. This development is of course only a paralell to what have happened in Norway and other places the last few years, but it's still strange to see turban-headed Sikhs talk into their handyphones inside buildings where the diesel-run aggregate is providing electricity during just another of those familiar power-failures and the wires hanging dirty and dusty in chaos from the roof. Actually, wireless telephones is a brilliant idea in India without its need for wired infrastructure, but as fas as Internet goes, wires are a must.

Therefore we were lucky, and very happy to find a well equiped room with a fast connection in Park Hotell, Calcutta - even though the charge of about 100 Nkr an hour was a bit too much. Unfortunately, we didn't spend enough time in Calcutta to be able to get this letter off. If so, I would have climbed up an sharp ladder to a room over a shop which offered 'Xeroxing' and fax facilities in a space of about 2 cubic meters and typed the letter - one of the few places which offered public computer service, including email. Instead this is now written in Darjeeling in the Himalayas in a computer education centre. The city hasn't got any Internet connection yet, but there are rumours that a guy from Siliguri down at the Bengali plain is looking for subscribers up here, so maybe next time?