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access the internet through their mobile phones. The availability of relatively inexpensive handsets with the ability to connect to the internet combined with the almost complete wireless phone coverage of the country is pushing internet use. What is most striking is that 68 million internet users are from rural areas, which have recorded a growth rate of over 50% in the last one year. Of these 25 million access the internet through mobile phones. Other than mobile phones, the cyber cafe has been another important source of access to many people, perhaps playing the same role that the ubiquitous PCO/STD/ISD booths did in spreading telecommunications in the 1990s. The gures of internet usage, given out by the Internet and Mobile Association of India, indicate that it was only after the mobile use stabilised in 2010-11 did the shift to the internet start. Even now, internet use is dened in the most minimal terms and does not really imply an ability to access freely the information and communication capabilities of the medium. However, it does seem that the practical and cultural barrier to accessing the internet has been breached, maybe even the nancial one. Perhaps, new government policies need to ride piggyback on the path cleared by the citizen-consumers themselves and use the existing mobile network to push internet use. The shift from low teledensity to almost universal coverage was so swift that most observers and policymakers were left stranded with the conceptions and rhetoric of a bygone era. Something similar may well be happening with the internet. Given the rates at which the internet using population has grown and is projected to grow, it is now perhaps futile to talk of a digital divide in the terms we did even a couple of years back. That however does not mean that new divides, inequalities and barriers to access will not emerge. But to be able to identify them and work out strategies to address them will need us to be alive to the rapid pace of change, to the fact that the spread of the internet, combined with the mobile phone, is an extremely disruptive and transformational technology. Unfortunately, it appears that we are unable to recognise this revolution for what it is and thus remain unprepared to deal with either its dangers or its possibilities.
rather than a crude gun, must be ready to be killed. Kennedy showed that he was: courage, full-face now and a prole no more. The parallel with Bengals terrorism must not, of course, be taken too far or too literally. But to look at Kennedys face in the television lm of a Press conference was to be reminded of some faces this writer saw in his early boyhood in East Bengal. There was a certain something in those terrorists faces; and it was there again in Kennedys face. It is futile to try to describe or dene it. Is there a clue in it to Calcuttas grief over the assassination of John F Kennedy, the thirty-fth President of the United States of America? Thats the quality of a city: to make a public occasion its personal joy or sorrow.
A CALCUTTA DIARY
out to kill; ever since he took ofce the numerous warmongers in the U S A and elsewhere have been subdued. He clashed with General de Gaulle, who is bent upon adding to the worlds nuclear dangers. He quarrelled with Adenauer whose ideas are not all peaceful. In his own country McCarthyism dared not raise its head again; Barry Goldwater got no concessions from Kennedy, as McCarthy had from Eisenhower. Then Kennedy was out to kill all those south of the Mason-Dixon Line who still cannot bear the thought of having to treat the Nigra as a human being. He was out to kill all those who proted from that immobilisme into which the American society was drifting. And a killer such as this, though he use Presidential powers
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