Viswanathan K's Thoughts

This blog is based on two interesting titbits from Harish Mehta’s The Maverick Effect . ~~   A surprising cameo in the NASSCOM story is the actor, Shammi Kapoor. Even though he was in his 70’s, he was connecting to the Internet (long before the Internet took off in India) to access world news. “He was an Internet enthusiast with an incredibly curious mind. He took to new technologies like a fish to water.” NASSCOM tried to enlist him to pitch the benefits of the Internet in India to bureaucrats and policy makers in government. He agreed to do it. For free. His celebrity status was a big attraction. He spoke passionately of the world it could open up, how he connected to his kids abroad via the Internet. “His personality and presentation skills helped us communicate the potential of the Internet to even bureaucrats.” ~~   In the 80’s and 90’s, there was the huge problem of terribly slow data links from the West to India. Even the laughably slow 64 kbps link co...

NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Service Companies) is a trade association. It started by serving the needs of the still-in-infancy software companies, but has expanded to include BPO’s, R&D centers, and startups. “(NASSCOM is) India Inc brand builder, a think tank, a lobbyist group, an interventionist or more.”   This may sound like a reviled lobbying and backroom dealing entity, but as Harish Mehta writes in The Maverick Effect , back in 1988 (when NASSCOM was founded), it was a necessity. “NASSCOM was incubated at a time when it was an uphill battle to even get software recognized as a tangible product or a service, and something different from computer hardware.” Hard to even imagine such a confusion today…   Back then, the Indian body representing software companies was really a body for computer hardware companies, MAIT. MAIT treated software as the poor cousin. Mehta and a few others wondered if the only way was to form a dedicated body to...