Monday, November 4, 2002		Book Review

Vignettes of people behind India’s IT revolution
Nirvana under the rain tree: Stories of fortunes and flameouts from India’s Internet revolution
by Samar Halarnkar. Books Today,  New Delhi.  Pages 236. Rs. 295.

WHY would you write a book that might get outdated even as you finished keying it in? Either because the story was powerful and needed to be told or because you were supremely confident of your writing abilities. Samar Halarnkar’s book brings to life the spirit of the Internet nerds who dared to dream. Of course, many dreams turned out to be just that, but we do have the right to dream on, don’t we?
Halarnkar’s life is forever intertwined with the Internet. He found the girl who was to become his wife through the medium and the relationship developed through e-mails. "Over the next few months, the anonymity of the Internet allowed us to share our joys, our sorrows, our ambitions, our passions — and all this without ever knowing what the other looked like, not even what the other sounded like. No photos, no phones. That was the unspoken, unwritten rule of our relationship." This has a beautiful real-life ending, and they will, hopefully live happily ever after.

Thousand of young men and women all over the country were swept off their feet during the great Internet euphoria of 1999-2000. In Mumbai they work with the Internet that you see but in Bangalore they work with the Internet you don’t see, as the book says. Everyone who could handle a mouse and a keyboard had dreams of making millions and this book has vignettes of those whose enterprises garnered at least a million dollars in investment from venture capitalists. You have Alok Kejriwal of contests2win.com whose father, a traditional businessman, scoffed at his idea in 1998. But with the crucial help from Cyrus Oshidar, MTV’s creative head, he ploughed on to carve out his own Internet success story.

Impulsesoft, in Bangalore, is far removed from the flash lifestyles, neon-lit billboards and conspicuous consumption seen in the companies that had to struggle for the second round of funding, and did not see the third. It is still around, providing Bluetooth technology solutions worldwide.

Conspicuous consumption was the norm. The author cites the case of Go4i.com that was spending a few crore a month. The chief marketing officer’s salary is Rs 19 lakh per annum, chief of staff, Rs 16 lakh, head, Web advertising Rs 11 lakh and so on. No wonder the company, which belongs to the Hindustan Times Group in Delhi, spent over Rs 3 crore in November 2000. The revenues were insignificant, and it has vanished into cyberspace now.

In fact, for companies were valued for over $ 10 million, attracted venture capital investment of over $ 1 million, but had no profits! How could they be expected to be businesses?

Yet the Internet impacted lives in India in so many ways that it has woven itself into the matrix on cultural ethos. H-1 is no longer an esoteric category of American visas but has become a common figure of speech. Many started using e-mail and cyber cafes sprouted in the most unlikely of places. All this would not have happened had it not been for the dream.

Halarnkar has to be commending for helping the reader relate to the reality beyond the great digital dream. A good bibliography and an index add to the value of the work. The reality bytes in this book offer vignettes of lives impacted by the Internet revolution. As Mahesh Murthy says in the book: "This is a long, cold nuclear winter. Survive it." — R.S.