CONNECTED COUNTRY

30 years of the internet in India through 30 milestones

- K. SUNIL THOMAS

What do Yahoo! and Shammi Kapoor have in common? As it turns out, a lot more than that iconic shout in the Mohammed Rafi song 'Chahe Koi Mujhe Junglee Kahe' from Junglee (1961).

The romantic hero was also an internet pioneer in the country back in the days, forming the first Internet Users Club of India, and going door to door in Mumbai demonstrating how the internet worked and how it could change our lives.

And if you were one of the early users of the internet back then, like Kapoor, it was literally impossible to avoid the first of the Big Techs—Yahoo! The Silicon Valley-based company may have lost its perch by now to the likes of Google and Meta, but in those glory days in the 1990s, Yahoo! was king—from its email to its salaciously addictive chat rooms where a thousand flowers of freewheeling thought, speech and desires bloomed safe in the internet's early promise of anonymity and no censorship. Yahoo! was everywhere, and not just in Kapoor's lexicon.

The internet completed 30 years in India this year, and perhaps it is ironic, yet at the same time rather apt, that the milestone did not garner much attention. Ironic, considering the transformation it unleashed on the nation, and also pretty much in the scheme of things because of more or less the same reason—how universal it is now and how integral it has become to our daily lives. It seems like it has always been around.

In 2005, when the internet completed a decade in the country, THE WEEK ran a cover story, predicting that the usage 'e-life', then common terminology describing a lifestyle spending inordinately long hours online, would soon be called, just simply, life.