NO LINE, ON LINE AND OFF LINE

OVER A BILLION mobile handsets 0 in India (the estimated number is 1.2 billion plus), making this the most-owned item in the country.

- Kiran Karnik

Complemented by networks spanning the country, the lowest tariffs in the world, and cheap data rates, over 650 million of this access the internet.

With so many online, it seems that the whole country has moved to Cyberia (Russian friends, note the spelling - and not the phonetic sound - before you get alarmed and wonder whether India is in a NATOlike expansionist mode). For the first time, so many Indians are connected to one another, and everyone who is anyone is on at least a dozen WhatsApp groups.

What a change from the days of yore! Dinosaurs - like I - will recall a time when a dozen families were part of a different group: the share-a-phone-line community. Phones were as scarce as water in the Yamuna in summer, and getting a new phone line took only marginally less time than the final hearing in a court case.

Along-distance call - known as a trunk call required a booking to be made through an operator and even an "urgent" one required the patience of just short of that demanded on the rush hour on the Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway (the last word indicative of the authorities' sense of humour!). The impatient and desperate could book a lightning call, though the price difference between an ordinary trunk call, an urgent one, and a lightning call escalated exponentially.

"NO LINE"