A friend recently blogged about the Indian elections and wrote in his post about a tweet from the Aam Admi Party’s Somnath Bharti, in frustration as he wasn’t able to upload a video of his party workers being beaten up in Amethi, that he would have done so if the broadband would have been better. It struck my friend as funny, at the time, but it struck me as very telling. Amethi could be considered one of India’s VIP constituencies, a stronghold of the Gandhi family. Even an offhand comment about the inadequacy of the quality of broadband exposes how far away India really is from not just proving the internet to its people, but providing quality access. It also made me wonder how governments of the day blame YouTube for their communal law and order problems, given that YouTube is painfully slow to load in New Delhi itself most of the time – but I digress.
If TV adverts were anything to go by, India is nodding along to “what an Idea sirjee” and a plethora of celebrities are using 3G to post silly videos of each other. Urban youth have no concerns outside Facebook and Twitter, and everyone seems to have only content to create, with the speed of broadband a given.
And then there is the mainstream med