3 Review(s)

This book is a “first-person, singular-number” account of Indian Information Technology (IT) scene—studded with personal reminiscences of Indira Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, Rajiv Gandhi and the iconic leader Sam Pitroda from India and John Diebold, the father of automation from the USA. Interspersed by many facets, episodes and occasional, incisive analyses, the colourful scenario began, for the author, from management in 1966, reached computers as “Commonwealth Scholar” in 1968-72 and—after over four decades—still continues with metadata management in national audio-video (A-V) cultural archives, as “Tagore Research Scholar”, from 2012 onwards. It remains primarily a User viewpoint that observes not just hardware (HW) and software (SW), but mainly applications, emerge into the Indian arena and bring forth cataclysmic changes in the total scenario,—belying all the dire predictions of loss of employment and ultimate doom, and eventually ushering in utility and felicity at an unimaginable level: exceeding even the rosiest of all expectations. It has been, in a nutshell, transition from the “worst of times” to the “best of times”, in a true Dickensian sense !