Note: This text, written in 1998, is extracted from the archives of Alok b. Nandi for the site mahanet.com

Gurus, Avatars & co. building CyberIndia Inc.
Is it needed to present nowadays what is Internet? Amongst IT professionals, amongst business executives, certainly not. Internet is "ŕ la mode" (fashionable), and you better have an e-mail address on your visiting card, or you might look out of the game (remember the cell phone syndrome: coming back to India after four years, I was quite surprised to see the cell phone boom and was getting tired to hear so many of these ringing everywhere especially during conferences - we definitely should have celletiquette in real life like netiquette in cyberlife - respect the other).

However, there are audiences who need some basic explanations. Otherwise you might end up with a question such: `Can you please give me an Internet on a floppy ?'. OK, this question might pop up (and did) anywhere in the world (remember less than 0.8 % of the population is connected to the Net in France). The point is simply that we are seeing the emergence of a new class of people who might forget to keep track of any dialogue with the `general audience', the `lambda' citizen, as we call him when designing interactive media projects.

So, we are seeing a new war appearing between the `digital caste' against the `brown sahibs' webentrepreneurs against bureaucrats. This seems to become the universal war, at least in Belgium, in France, in Italy, in Spain, without talking of South America, of Africa, ... India is now entering a new phase of its history, moving from `Mahabharata to Mahanet' (by the way, http://www.mahanet.com will host some view points on what's happening on the interactions between India and Internet).