The Next 4 Billion

Tomi T Ahonen, author of “Communities Dominate Brands” writes in this blog post:

To put it in context, there are 480 million newspapers printed daily; 800 million automobiles registered on the planet; 1.1 billion personal computers including all desktops, laptops, notebooks and netbooks; 1.2 billion fixed landine phones; 1.4 billion internet users; 1.5 billion TV sets; 1.7 billion unique holders of a credit card of any type; and 2.1 billion unique holders of a banking account of any kind. But 4 billion mobile phone subscriptions.

That is at one level astounding but then there is visual confirmation that this is true. Even in India, without checking the numbers, there must be more mobile phone users than TV households, newspaper readers, computer users, internet subscribers, etc.

Tomi says that the first 4 billion were the classic “early adopters”. But the next 4 billion will be different. To quote

So here is the big news. The next 4 Billion will not be like you and me. They will not be wealthy enough to own a PC and have a broadband connection and read blogs or do any Twittering on a PC. Over 95% of the next 4 billion will be in the Developing World, and while there will be of course an emerging middle class who may aspire to own a netbook, those tend to be wealthy enough to already have a subscription today. Those next four billion will be either those who do not have any connection today, at all, or else are second and third subscriptions to those who already have one today. Either way, the behavior of those new subscribers is distinctly different from what the mobile industry has grown accustomed to in the past decades.

Countries in Asia and Africa led by India and China will soon dominate the cellular waves. They will decide the services, the prices, the content, the usage – in short, they will define the market. This is a the new community of consumers, of citizens who have the means to give voice to their lives.

We saw mobile phones in use during all the recent elections in India.

If one looks at some of the advertisements of the mobile phone companies like Airtel and Tata DoCoMo on Indian television, already there is this clear highlighting of their mobile subscriber base.  Airtel has SRK talking about “Akele kuch bhi nahin…” and then the plug about 110 million people. DoCoMo has this “Friendship Express” theme.

One needs to watch this carefully.

Hard Rain a-gonna fall

Bob Dylan sang

And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son?
And what did you hear, my darling young one?
I heard the sound of a thunder that roared out a warnin’,
I heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world,
I heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin’,
I heard ten thousand whisperin’ and nobody listenin’,
I heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin’,
I heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter,
I heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley,
I heard the sound of one person who cried he was human,
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard,
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.

Well, it seems that the Indian Met department are also singing the same song. They are calling in the Marines, well almost. An American N81WE aircraft is flying in to Ojhar in Nashik for cloud seeding experiments using silver iodide crystals and furnaces.

So far, all their experiments have failed.

The BMC has already started a 15% water cut. Truly, hard rain is a-gonna fall.

(un)Constitutional Dress Code

According to this report in The Hindu, banning burkhas in colleges is unconstitutional. The DCP of Dakshin Kannada says, the ban on burkha by a certain college in Mangalore is a “impingement on the individual and fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution”

So while banning burkhas is unconstitutional, banning the wearing of jeans and skirts and the like is not. Colleges in Uttar Pradesh have done so.

So unless people make “wearing jeans” part of some religious practice, colleges are free to ban it. With no one to stop them.

Poetry Posts – Walt Whitman

Yesterday, the post was on Emily Dickinson though the name of Walt Whitman was mentioned. I had promised to keep Walt Whitman for today so as to give full justice to great poet. The entire collection is right here at Bartelby.

I will quote selections from the poem “Passage To India“, a poem written to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal. It begins thus:

SINGING my days,
Singing the great achievements of the present,
Singing the strong, light works of engineers,
Our modern wonders, (the antique ponderous Seven outvied,)
In the Old World, the east, the Suez canal,
The New by its mighty railroad spann’d,
The seas inlaid with eloquent, gentle wires,
I sound, to commence, the cry, with thee, O soul,
The Past! the Past! the Past!

The metaphorical allusion to a bridge between modernity (New World) and tradition (Old World) is being made here.

Passage, O soul, to India!
Eclaircise the myths Asiatic—the primitive fables.

The passage to India is now open, so he calls upon all to sail forth.

(Ah Genoese, thy dream! thy dream!
Centuries after thou art laid in thy grave,
The shore thou foundest verifies thy dream!)

A reference to the famous Genoese, Christopher Columbus, whose dream is now fulfilled in America, the country he discovered.

Again Vasco de Gama sails forth;
Again the knowledge gain’d, the mariner’s compass,
Lands found, and nations born—thou born, America, (a hemisphere unborn,)
For purpose vast, man’s long probation fill’d,
Thou, rondure of the world, at last accomplish’d.

Allusions to famous explorers and specifically Vasco Da Gama, who sailed round Africa to find India. Like him many others found new lands, including America.

O my brave soul!
O farther, farther sail!
O daring joy, but safe! Are they not all the seas of God?
O farther, farther, farther sail!

In the end, he pleads all to go further and further, far beyond they have ever been.  To travel to new lands, to see new things. Could it be a metaphorical allusion to ignorance?

Madurai

The Hairy Bikers were in Madurai enjoying what they called a “packed lunch”. I had a couple of days of work in Madurai and as is wont mixed pleasure with work to make the most of the travel.

When approaching the Meenakshi Temple, one saw this

From Meenakshi Temple Madurai

 Note the film posters contrasting with the Chennai Khadi Vastralaya. 

The gopurams of the temple were covered, possibly to protect against the rain.

From Meenakshi Temple Madurai

 For more details, click on the Madurai page in my Travelogs

The State of Mathematics in India

A World Bank study reported in Bloomberg suggests there is a huge gap in maths understanding and it has direct relationship with overall economic progress.

If other states are similar to the ones studied then it would mean that 17 million Indian students don’t meet the lowest international benchmark of “some basic mathematical knowledge.” That’s 22 times the corresponding figure for the U.S

But they also suggest that

The variance has less to do with household income, caste, parental literacy or wealth; more of it may be due to the quality of schooling a child receives.

Therefore

this is a “hopeful sign” because “it is easier to change behavior among teachers and to improve schools, than it is to do the same thing among parents.”

Indian Retail Industry – Becoming difficult for new entrants

AT Kearney writes in their Global Report

1. Increasing real estate costs
2. Competition
3. FDI confusion

While Indian retailers are moving to Tier 2 and Tier 3, foreign retailers are still thinking.

An historical restitution

The whole issue of jobs that are moving to India from Britain and America is the perfect example of irony of historical proportions. I went through an extremely moving article by George Monbiot.

I quote some interesting passages
Britain’s industrialisation was secured by destroying the manufacturing capacity of India. In 1699, the British government banned the import of woollen cloth from Ireland, and in 1700 the import of cotton cloth (or calico) from India. Both products were forbidden because they were superior to our own. As the industrial revolution was built on the textiles industry, we could not have achieved our global economic dominance if we had let them in. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, India was forced to supply raw materials to Britain’s manufacturers, but forbidden to produce competing finished products. We are rich because the Indians are poor.

There is a profound historical irony here. Indian workers can outcompete British workers today because Britain smashed their ability to compete in the past. Having destroyed India’s own industries, the East India Company and the colonial authorities obliged its people to speak our language, adopt our working practices and surrender their labour to multinational corporations. Workers in call centres in Germany and Holland are less vulnerable than ours, as Germany and Holland were less successful colonists, with the result that fewer people in the poor world now speak their languages.

The article closes with a line to remember

For centuries, we have permitted ourselves to ignore the extent to which our welfare is dependant on the denial of other people’s. We begin to understand the implications of the system we have created only when it turns against ourselves.