Month: February 2007

The $100 un-PC

Entrepreneurs, philanthropists and established computer firms have for the better part of a decade invested millions of dollars to lower the cost of a desktop PC and develop cheaper alternatives. Intel has made its Eduwise laptop; AMD, a Personal Internet Communicator; Microsoft, the FonePlus. MIT computer guru Nicholas Negroponte’s Children’s Machine, now called the XO, is the most publicized recent attempt at converting the poor into computer users. But Negroponte’s idea is to spread computers to the poor, with the help of heavy subsidies from private and public philanthropy. His price is still about $140, too high for India. Indeed India rejected Negroponte’s offer of a million for cost reasons. Jain’s motive is different: he wants to make money.

And he knows India. Despite the country’s rise as an outsourcing hub, PCs are selling slowly—far more slowly than mobile phones or motorbikes—because they are too expensive, too complicated to use and too difficult to maintain. What people have been waiting for, some experts think, is a new approach to computing that boils the essence of Internet access down to its lowest cost—and lowest risk. Jain plans to offer all this in lease deals that include easy-to-use hardware, Internet connection, application software and service—for $10 a month.

Read it all.

Police and Politicians

If this report from Tehelka about the complicity of the police in the Nithari serial killings does not outrage you, check your pulse–you may be brain dead and therefore be qualified to be an Indian political leader.

Numerology Question

I need help with replying to this email which has been sitting in my inbox for a while. Every time I open it with intentions of replying, words fail me. Any suggestions from the gallery on what the appropriate response should be?

Atanu:

I read your article on name change and I found it fascinating. Do you have a numerologist you could recommend? I’ve just written my first novel and I need to choose between my name and married name. Thanks so much.

All the best,
Novel Writer

Thank you kindly for any help.

OLPC at the WEF at Davos

David Kirkpatrick filed a CNN report about the movers and shakers of this world at the World Economic Forum at Davos. The Nestle CEO Peter Brabeck-Letmathe apparently pooh-poohed global warming and trashed Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth.” Kirkpatrick later asked Vinod Khosla what he thought of Brabeck-Letmathe’s position. “He should see his proctologist to find his head,” said Khosla, “and you can quote me.” I like that sort of ‘say it like you see it’ attitude.
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Learning a bit of History from Lt Gen Thapan

It is important to know what happened and why, and how we got to where we are today before we have a good shot at understanding where we should be going and how we could get there. If we are lost in any sense today, it could be because we are ignorant of our past and cannot quite figure out where we ought to be heading, leave alone knowing how to get there. We don’t know our history. Chalk that one up as yet another failing of our dismal educational system.

Reading someone who has lived through events that define our past is a learning experience. Lieutenant General M L Thapan, Param Veer Seva Medal, has just added an important bit to my very limited understanding of India’s recent history. He’s seen most of the last hundred years, being 89 years old. Long before most of us were born, he was fighting wars. Ramanand Sengupta spoke with him, Rediff.com reports:

He fought in two major campaigns in World War II.

After Independence, his division was ‘two-and-a-half km from Sialkot when the ceasefire whistle blew in (the second India-Pakistan war) 1965.’ And in 1971, he faced enemy fire again when he was asked to clear one of the three sectors into which East Pakistan had been marked out by India’s Eastern Command.

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