My mother retired from her job as a high school mathematics teacher on March 31st this year. After having worked 9 to 5 all her life, she is finally at home full time. My father is thrilled because he doesn't have to eat lunch alone anymore. Of course, my mother is bored. My parents live in the Andhra town of Visakhapatnam where traditionally there has not been much to occupy retired people. She entertains herself by calling me, her only child, here in USA almost every day. Usually our conversations go on, as most mother and daughter conversations do, about marriages, births, illnesses and my father's bad temper. But in the past few days she has sprung surprises on me.

It began innocently enough. She had all her provident fund and gratuity money deposited into a new bank. Last Wednesday, she called me to ask about ATM cards. The advantages and disadvantages of owning them, and how an ATM card is different from a credit card. I had given my parents credit cards many years ago. My mother put hers in the bank locker and refuses to ever use it. Each time I visit home, I give her new cards. They share the same fate. My dad has no problem using his credit card. But my mother thinks it is a sin to use credit and also that it is too complicated to use the card. This sudden interest in ATM cards was astonishing.

She called on Friday again. A former colleague of hers was looking at setting up some online mathematics courses and asked her to write about some interesting topics. "What is HTML?" "What is a website?" and so on she questioned me. I had visited India in January this year and tried very hard to get her to see my own website. My dad was more than happy to check out all the links. My mother kept postponing the trip to the Internet cafe by asking questions like "Do I really have to touch a mouse?" I knew she was joking. She does have some idea about computers. She used to teach computer-related mathematics to the students in her class. She was just not interested. And now, in less than three months time, she was asking me about HTML syntax.

The third call came yesterday. It was very brief. It was a little past 6 a.m. and I was half-asleep. "Check your mail" was the first sentence. Huh? "Email, email" she said and hung up the phone. I booted up my computer quickly and did check my email. Nothing. I was so curious I immediately called her up and asked her what was happening. Someone had called our home, in an Indian version of telemarketing, and offered computer classes for fifty rupees each day. She had enrolled herself in the classes and the first day was spent in setting up an email account and sending email. She had created her own email address and mailed me. But she had missed a letter in my email address and the bits had dropped on the floor. And I was ready to drop on the floor too. My mother had sent me an email! My father had emailed me once about a year ago. I told him the email had come with a virus attached to it. He then gave the Internet cafe owner a piece of his mind saying his daughter's "expensive" computer (meaning mine) was being spoilt by terrible viruses from the Internet cafe. That was the end of his association with email. And now this mail from my mother.

In 1988, when I joined the engineering college, there were hardly any computers even within our reasonably large university. There were 15 terminals in the computer lab with one XENIX machine. Only a few of the terminals were hooked up on any given occasion. In our first year FORTRAN programming and linear regression class, the teacher used to snore away at the desk. We used to kill time by sending printouts (a crime punishable by banishment from the computer lab) to the lonely line printer locked up in another room. In my third year, my lab partner was someone more computer aware than the rest of us in the class. He actually wrote a program to do some boring induction motor efficiency calculations. He got a printout of the results and stuck it in his lab record book. I copied the same figures by hand into my record. Our teacher threw his record book out of the lab. This Ph.D. from somewhere in Russia said "Useless fellow. Can't you use your brain and calculate the values by hand? This is not a job for a computer." By 1992, when I graduated, the situation was slightly improved. There was a workstation in the small room with the line printer and this room was even air-conditioned. The room had a capacity of two people and I had to frequently squat in front of the entrance waiting for one of the two souls to come out. I used the workstation to produce some plots for my final year project and that was the end of my using computers in India. Eight years later, the situation is so different.

The Internet revolution is sweeping through India with gale force and it has even touched my sixty-year-old mother. Sometimes I wish I was younger and had studied in India in these times. Almost everyone I know in India has a computer at home or visits Internet cafes frequently. Some even have faster computers than mine at home. My sleepy Indian hometown is transformed by advertisements for Internet access providers and Hewlett Packard PCs and printers. Students there check their email every day. They use voice over Internet to talk to their friends. I think its incredible how India has embraced the IT revolution and how IT has embraced even my mother. She now wants to buy her own computer and email me everyday.

It seems that along with the Internet, many new ways of doing business, dealing with life, and attitudes towards money and happiness have arrived in India. There are many Indians I know, here in USA, who refuse to believe that anything has changed in India. "Oh! It's the same even now. Forget it." etc. Some of them haven't visited India for three or four years. A few are stuck in some time warp image of India. An India where educated young people from even middle class families cannot create successful lives for themselves. And the only way to escape is by going to some foreign country. I feel that while many young Indians do have a difficult time getting a good education, or a well paying job, the tide is slowly but surely turning.

I haven't lived in India for more than seven years now and I don't know exactly when things started changing. I just know that every time I visit my hometown I feel the gap between India and USA seems to be decreasing. Yes, some things are still jarringly different - the electricity fails, the water supply is bad in summer, the road in front of my parent's home has been dug up for two years in the name of laying underground drainage pipes. But the neighborhood vegetable shop owner knows what email is and I can't help marveling. I don't know who is to thank for this. Maybe it is the Chief Minister Naidu, the Indian government, or just regular citizens of Visakhapatnam. I do know that the youths who graduated from my alma mater this year are a lot more enthusiastic about their future than any of us were eight years ago about ours. They have options besides abandoning India the way many of my classmates and I did. And I'm just thankful that my mother doesn't have to wait about an hour in the bank to withdraw her own money thanks to her new ATM card. I'm grateful that she can spend quiet afternoons flipping between 50 different TV channels. I'm hopeful that she can send me email everyday. Praise the Indian IT (and everything else) revolution.

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