On the present generation's apathy towards all things rural, Jaideep is more hopeful than most. He considers us decent, unaware people too caught up in an economic boom to look at the rest of us. "We want to succeed and there are opportunities for us to succeed after a long time. We want to make the best of everything, and now. Which is great, I love it. Because we're in a hurry we don't have much time to look at India B or India C. But I'm confident that if our attention is drawn to it, we will. Because we are basically decent people."
"I think we can be more equitable," he says when asked to comment on the current Indian government, "which, in theory, the government seems to be preaching. I just don't know how much it is practising it. Perhaps it is. I love Dr Kalam's idea of urban infrastructure in rural areas. I love the work that micro-credit people are doing. I love the fact that the rural economy is growing in many areas."
"But I don't love the fact that most people are not aware of an experiment we had implemented, which I'd read in the Harvard Business Review 10 years back," he smiles at yet-another invaluable decade-old memory, digressing to grin and add the thought that's there's a movie in the story. "They went and put one telephone in a village in Karnataka. Just one telephone. Before the PCO boom started. They went after three years. The per-capita income of the village had gone up, multiple times. The middlemen were out of the vegetable market. The bank balances of an average villager had gone up many times. Some people from the village had gone abroad for the first time in their lives."
"Just access, and a telephone. What does it take? It takes us nothing to do it. The cable revolution and the telecom revolution have given this country the biggest fillip than what all of us imagine we have done. They are much bigger stories than all of us, and what any of us do."
Photograph: Rob Elliott/AFP/Getty Images
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