is Siddharth Varadarajan a silly fellow

only a silly fellow can state that," The drop in call rates has nothing to do with subsidised spectrum as Mr. Sibal would have us believe, but with competition, increases in productivity and the global ebb and flow of technological change and obsolescence which allowed Indian companies to buy 2G network equipment at a relatively inexpensive cost."

such authoritativeness will not be observed even in long-time telecom experts, who know all about the history and geography of telecom all over the world.

but, having won an award or two, Siddharth Varadarajan has begun to believe that his opinion is weighty enough to wade into every matter. he says the drop in call rates has something to do with competition. but the award-winning journalist does not understand that with auction, there wont be competition.

he says that he bought   "a no-brand, 386 chip, 40MB hard drive heavyweight monster whose battery lasted about an hour if I was lucky" in 1990 for $1000. the award-winning journalist does not say whether what he bought then was a decently best in class product, or a worst in class product. he compares the technologies over a range of twenty years. the award-winning journalist does not realise that even after these twenty years, between when he first bought a laptop and now, a laptop has not reached more than 5-10% of our population.

today, when laptops are being distributed to rural students, the internet availability is a consequence of the 2g network that sustains the whole nation's technology leap.

what we have here is a kind of journalist, who gives some bit of information at some point to his/her readers, who have something to chew on, for that point in time. some later bit of information is given at some later point, or not given, driven by the flow of the political discourse. there is no appeal, award-winning siddharth varadarajan feels, in giving his audience not what they want to know, but what they need to know. if in the process, his newspaper begins to be identified with the government, then he feels that only rivals will benefit, the rivals who are probably seen as telling the truth, even as they only mislead and twist and misrepresent, half truths and quarter histories, as the character called aditya sinha was doing at the new indian express.

what we have here is the middle classes' need for a scam and greed to witness the fall of the politicians. some in our middle classes and upwardly mobile have now turned to religion in a wholesale manner, they are so pious with respect of their wants and needs that they are so beautifully devout, such sticklers to the rituals and superstitions, so many fears torment them, as they want their new way of life to go on forever.

what can the hindu do in such a scenario of utmost religiosity aimed at utmost material bliss. the packaged advice of sri sri and the blissfully beautiful life. the hindu also could not resist this fall and disgrace, of keeping this small section of our population humoured in its fallacies, because it has the buying power that the hindu needs, without that buying power, the hindu will wither away. there is no point in repelling the moneyed sections, by giving them something which they would not quite like, which is the truth.

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/article1081263.ece