The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone

Excerpts from Shashi Tharoor's, The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone



In March 2007, seven million Indians subscribed to new mobile phones.That's a world record. In September 2006, India overtook China for the first time in the number of telephone subscribers per month. We're still way behind China in the total number of cellphone users(just over 140 million against their 450 million), but each month the gap is narrowing. By 2010, the government tells us we'll have 500 million Indian telephone users. China will probably be still ahead, but on a phones-per-capita basis there will be little to choose between us.

Now to anyone who grew up in pre-liberalization India, that's astonishing. Bureaucratic stat-ism committed a long list of sins against woeful state of India's telephones right up to the 1990s, with only eight million connections and another 20 million on the waiting lists, would have been a joke if it wasn't also a tragedy- and a man-made one at that. We had possible the worst telephone penetration rates in the world. The government's indifferent attitude to the need to improve India's communications infrastructure was epitomized by prime minister Indira Gandhi's Communications Minister, C.M. Stephen, who declared in parliament, in response to a question decrying the rampant telephone breakdowns in the country, that telephones were a luxury, not a right and that any Indian who was not satisfied with his telephone service could return his phone - since there was an eight year waiting-list of people seeking this supposedly inadequate product.
Stephen's statement captured perfectly everything that was wrong with the government's attitude. It was

• Ignorant (he clearly had no idea of the colossal socio-economic losses caused by poor communications),
• Wrong-headed (he saw a practical problem only as an oppertunity to score a political point),
• Unconstructive(responding to complaints by seeking a solution apparantely did not occur to him),
• self-righteous (the socialists cant about telephone being a luxury and not a right),
• complacent (taking pride in a waiting list the existence of which should have been a source of shame, since it pointed to the poor performance of his own ministry in putting up telephone lines and manufacturing equipment),
• unresponsive (feeling no obligation to provide a service in return for the patience, and the fees, of the country's telephone subscribers) and
• insulting(asking long suffering telephone subscribers to return their instruments instead of doing anything about their complaints).

It was altogether typical of an approach to governance in the economic arena which assumed that the government knew what was good for the country, felt no obligation to prove it by actual performance and didn't, in any case, care what anyone else thought.

Kasganj - Wikipedia (2120 AD)

Kasganj( Hindi - कासगंज) is the holy city of India known for its historic importance. The multicultural, multiethnic and cross- economy friendly city is the manufacturing hub of various products of international brands, although the city emerged on the world map, being credited as the birth place of Creator of Matrix Yash Maheshwari (sometimes also referred as Father of Matrix)

Geographical Attributes

The new city of Kasganj extends from the outskirts of New Delhi to the outskirts of Lucknow although the original Kasganj (in the centre of the new City) was only 10 sq kms in area. The city started expanding rapidly when it gained popularity in 2041 when three students of ITBHU unveiled to the world the real story surrounding the city.

Manufacturing Industry

The grand city is known for being the manufacturing centre of various international brands of electronics and clothing like Reebok, Rado, Nikon and Rolex. In 2035 Tharki-Veeru Foundation For Copyrights Protection alleged that various contractual labors working for Yash (read the creator of Matrix) have been working undercover, in small workshops who do the job of merely stamping labels of the known brands on sadakchhap products. The case is being fought in the Matrix’s Supreme Court (the omnipotent court, master to all the one’s known till 2020, and intentionally hidden from the world till then) and a verdict on the issue is being awaited.

Unveiling of the Historical Importance

In 2041 when a group of three scientist , and former ITBHU students -- maddy, chaman and Chuchu -- conducted a series of scientific experiments, originally intended to expose the spiritual secrets of the world, and in the process made a startling discovery that shook the entire world order. The legendry trio of maddy, chaman and Chuchu went on to prove that the hypothesis inspiring the 1999 scifi movie The Matrix, based on the existence of a virtual world known as Matrix is actually true. The unveiling of Matrix lead to a billion dollar search for the Creator of the program funded by the Jha-Cherry-Merry-Harry Spiritual Academy and ended at the Kasganj born Yash Maheshwari. In 2047, Jay Prakash (aka JP, the then Prime Minister of India) in a UN summit suggested to recognize Yash’s importance in the making of the universe and offered to create a position of a single world leader for all nations and have Yash - the greatest of all times – preside on it.

Creator’s Reaction on being offered to be the World Leader
The offer for position of world leader was immediately rejected by Yash in an act of courtesy and big brotherhood, although he felt comfortable to retain the title of The Creator. The decline of offer was very warmly applauded by the world leaders. However in 2051, the Shashi-Jallu Regulatory Committee charged Yash for stealing all the credit for idea of declining the offer, which they claimed was actually their own idea, which was rested in support of the various proved charges on Yash for stealing chillad items from hostel friends. These allegations were dismissed by Matrix court right away.


MilkyWay Land Controversy
The Tharki-Veeru Foundation while working on the Contract Labour issue, also found out that the Creator of Matrix was holding an estimated of 23.4 million Square Light Years of a Land in the Milky Way Galaxy under the false propietary of Sadka Corp. [citation needed]. It was later revealed that the actual amount of land was much more than the quoted value and the Creator of Matrix was planning to create a new refined Matrix like universe due to the problems he was facing with the alleged Human Virus - Chuchu. Sources also revealed that the new Matrix 2.0 would be renamed as 'Matrix Reloaded'. The Creator of Matrix plainly denied such charges and due to the limitations he put on Humans in Matrix it is virtually impossible to prove this controversy.

All Characters, places and events here are purely fictitious...Any resemblance with either dead or living is purely co-incidental :)