Is Jio encouraging Internet consumption or addiction?

Time and again invaders and dictators have used their power to usurp the power of expression from people. They have taken away natural resources that have been the fundamental right of a person. A person has to pay for them. In this age of technological revolution, Reliance has come up with a new policy to enslave the Internet surge. Jio was the brainchild of Mukesh Ambani who calculated the potential of the rising number of users of Internet in India. He thinks that by being the first person to launch Jio 4G technologies in India he can make Indians addicted to the Jio experience. The initial bounty of free offers and unlimited bandwidth attracted the maximum number of unique customers to Jio. Then after the bounty period is over the people will have been quite used to the brand of Jio. This will make them pay for the usage and thus increase the usage. 

 

Internet speed and Internet consumption are just two sides of a coin. As one increases the other one also increases. People who are just concerned about the service will never understand this relation. But slowly the average consumption of a person will increase three to four times more than his current consumption. This will make them spend more on the Internet usage per day as compared to the current expenditure.

To understand this, consider a person who smokes one cigar a day at the price of a cigarette for 3 months. After the bounty period the seller can charge him the actual value of the cigar and the person will spend it. He will never think about smoking a cigarette again because he’s used to the cigar. In fact in some cases the person under consideration can also increase his consumption.

In this age of Internet proliferation even the United Nations has declared the Internet as a fundamental right of the people. Nations like Estonia and Lithuania are known for their free Public Wifi Internet. Why is then India the world’s largest democracy in the world paying for its Internet consumption? Possibly it is because the people never think of it. They never realize that Internet has now become like air and water. Will you pay everyday for breathing oxygen? But this can only be understood by the future technologies that are coming up. Like the Internet of Things, which will change the way data is used. But these are later things. Primary is to realize that it is time that Internet becomes free like an open source platform which is only under one surveillance and that is the government and not any corporates.

Cigar or cigarettes either are going to burn; or can people get away with these? But in the end the choice should be that of the people.

 

People respond to Power of Thoughts not Pedigree

Yogi Adityanath has been elected as the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh and the press and TV channels are guessing the agenda of this government already. Some are of the view that this person is going to be against the minorities in the state, some think he will be against the Muslims in the state. All the while this choice has allowed the Congress and other belligerents of the BJP a chance to launch their salvo against the NDA government and PM Narendra Modi. Some other faction thinks that Yogi Adityanath is going to transform UP into an extrapolated Gorakhpur. A few years before when Yogi Adityanath was not elected in Gorakhpur, the city was a mess. Roads could have been a training ground for commandos who want to jump over potholes. Electricity and water was also a major challenge. But Yogi Adityanath changed the city into a ‘mini-Singapore’. Possibly nobody took notice of it.

The state of UP was ruled during the last few decades by parties who divided the state into factions of religions, minorities etc. This had even forced many youngsters to leave their home state and move to Metros like Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai to get a good education and find job opportunities. Because they know that in their home state all this is not possible. They even shifted their families to these cities permanently. Hooliganism in the name of minority status, religion and political affiliation had made the lives of people very difficult in the state. In spite of being such a big state with ample resources these parties forced an entire generation of youngsters to migrate. But Yogi Adityanath or the BJP was not responsible for any of these incidents. Then why is he branded as a fanatic or right-wing fundamentalist?

It is time that we understand that the religion of a person is his personal choice and it has nothing to do with one’s work. The people of India must evolve to get this philosophy in their character. The political parties need to know that people do not respond to anybody’s family pedigree. They respond to the power of their ideas. The BJP has a single-minded approach to its ideas and a strong leadership structure wherein the decision is streamlined and unquestionable. The BJP has a good number of Muslim candidates and minority candidates in it as it has Hindu candidates. But they are not there to practice their religions, rather to do some service to the people.

Comparing a leader who has clarity of thoughts to a dictator who killed millions is just a bogus propaganda designed to paint the leader in the colors of the dictator and taint his image. The media and the press must take on the responsibility to identify this trick and expose it to the public. The power of thoughts and intentions succeeds over all kinds of physical, economic and social powers.

As of now the election of the face of the CM and his Deputies has enamored a great confusion in the state. Maybe the new government can enamor an equal magnitude of accolades in the year to come or divide the state again into factions. Either way, this drama will have a guaranteed number of actors and an even larger audience ready to cheer them.