Thursday, June 14, 2007

Poor But Hi-Tech


Mark Sappenfield of The Christian Science Monitor
sees India as nouveau riche, where even the poor are
intent on being on the cutting edge :

"Even this reporter's housekeeper, Asha Maya Tamangi is
occasionally given to extravagance. She can nearly touch
every wall of her apartment from her bed, and when she
visits her parents in Nepal each summer, the trip involves
a four-hour flight, a 14-hour bus ride, and two days of trekking
through the Himalayas.

But when she needed to buy a mobile phone recently, simplicity
just wouldn't do. She wanted to use it to listen to the radio, to
take pictures of friends, and especially to make videos of her
parents that she could bring back to New Delhi.

So she spent $170 – almost the equivalent of two month's wages
– to get a phone far better than even her employer's."

Read the full story via Yahoo here

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