Monday, May 13, 2002		Article

Everything is ‘e’ nowadays
Kanwal Singh Bindusar

THE global IT market is reviving after facing a slowdown for a couple of months, as per the latest reports of NASSCOMand CII. Needless to mention that India is witnessing an IT era with an ambition to emerge as Information Technology (IT) superpower. IT has been coined, as India’s Today, India’s Tomorrow, India’s Treasure and what not. The term, ‘e’, has been attached for efficiency or effectiveness prefix with almost all facets of life giving a whole new ‘e’-world having e-mails, e-business, e-education, e-entertainment, e-shopping, e-banking, e-governance, e-commerce, etc. This gives an impetus to the emergence of a global culture — the e-culture. An all time, anywhere, anybody’s worker, the Internet is available for the ‘e’ services. The Internet never sleeps. It works tirelessly to provide 7x24x365 services to the global community. Open the magic bottle by logging on and the ‘Alladin ka jin’ (Internet) shall say ‘Kya Hukum Hai Mere Aka’.

The interesting part of the Internet is that it is not restricted to ‘Alladins’. It has the beauty of its value, neutrality towards gender, caste, religion, culture and area. The Internet provides a level playing field for the whole world and the global community. The Internet has really squeezed the world by demolishing various physical and psychological barriers and reaching every place, any person, anytime at a ‘mouse click’. In the entire human history, no other information tool had such a tremendous power and reach that could really turn the world upside down.

Electronic mails are catching up, leaving sweet memories of the good old days of delivery of mails through ‘pigeons’ which brings to mind the song ‘Kabootar Ja Ja Ja’. The song for this era now is ‘Pyar Ke Liye Hai Internet’. Log on to the Net and avail the mail services of Yahoo!, Hotmail or even ePatra. Send your mails at a mouse click in variety of languages. E-mails do not suffer from the postal strikes (and delays) and have an instant response time. Even online chat or messaging can be done for the real time discussion or sharing of information.

Enjoy the e-entertainment by listening to MP3 songs available free on numerous Internet sites. Just download and enjoy. The beauty is that a CD can contain as many as more than 100 songs in it. Move on to e-education. Get access to lectures and course material. But I want certification also. No problem. A number of online certification sites like Brainbench are available. Get registered, appear in online examinations and get certifications sitting at home. It’s so simple.

One of my friends had a genuine problem of coming late from office due to workload. His temptation generally reminded me of the famous advertisement ‘Yeh bechara kaam ke bojh ka mara’. And everyday he had to face his wife’s comments: ‘Ghar me atta aur dal khatam hai aur tumhe daftar se fursat hi nahin milti’. Having an awfully busy office schedule, the poor chap did not have any time for shopping. But one fine day he got the solution, the e-shopping. He registered with an e-shopping site and started placing orders while sitting at office. The goods were delivered at home and the problem was solved.

Don’t pollute the city for making utility bill payments and checking your bank accounts. Log on to e-utility or e-banking site and deposit your bills or check your accounts. The corporate sector has already realised the e-potential and has started using e-commerce in a sustained manner. Lot of e-com enabled sites are available and the companies have created their e-infrastructure to support the operations.