Cell Phone Nation: How Mobile Phones Have Revolutionized Business, Politics and Ordinary Life in India (3 page)

LIST OF MAPS, ILLUSTRATIONS, FIGURES AND TABLES

MAPS

ILLUSTRATIONS

(Between pages 142 and 143)

FIGURES

TABLES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In the Preface, we acknowledged debts to institutions
and to the very special family people who put up with us on a limited-warranty, no-refund, no-return basis.

Here, we try to thank those who helped us in a great many different and special ways. Some are longtime victims of our writing, consulted regularly for their willingness both to encourage and to warn. Into this category fall Alex Broom, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Nalin Mehta, Kama Maclean, Talis Polis, Philip Taylor and Ira Raja.

Others, like Kishor Dabke, have given us very special help—Kishor, in trying to improve our understanding of Radio Frequency technology and what it means for mobile telephony. He bears no responsibility, however, for errors that remain: they are our fault. Charles Thomson became for us a set of ever-inquisitive ears and eyes roaming north India in the course of his work with EKO and providing us with leads about mobile-phone developments. David Brewster, as a lawyer once involved in telecom contracting, read parts of the manuscript. Philip Lutgendorf read, listened, suggested and sent us photographs. Sonia Sharma and her colleagues at
MyMobile
have never turned us away when we have come calling on them for advice and connections. V. Thiruppugazh is someone from whose guidance we have frequently profited.

On visits to Lucknow and Allahabad, we benefited from the generosity of time and hospitality of M. Aslam (Allahabad University), Vivek Kumar (JNU), Badri Narayan (Pant Institute) and the journalist Sharat Pradhan.

Friends tolerated a diet of telephone tittle-tattle and
were still willing to abet our enthusiasm by putting us in touch with their connections able to help us with our inquiries. Nir Avieli, Frank Conlon, Eva Fisch, Maxine Loynd, Barbara Nelson, Amitendu Palit, Peter Mayer, Ronit Ricci, Jesse Rumsey-Merlan, Ronojoy Sen, Ornit-Shani, Pratima Singh, David Shulman, Kate Sullivan, Matt Wade, Thomas Weber and Tamir Yahav all fall into the category of patient listeners and generous helpers.

Helen Parsons in Canberra helped us shape the manuscript by bringing to bear on it the attentions of a skilful editor. Lee Li Kheng, a delightful cartographer at the National University of Singapore, drew the maps. We were remarkably lucky to encounter two editorial executives who shared our enthusiasm for this project. Michael Dwyer at C. Hurst in London, with whom Jeffrey had worked before, gave the project an adrenalin charge with his quick and keen response to our first approach. And Doron’s lucky meeting with Sharmila Sen of Harvard University Press connected us with another inspiring energiser.

Scholars like Amita Baviskar, Greg Bailey, Sara Dickey, Rachel Dwyer, Michael H. Fisher, Peter Friedlander, Hugo Gorringe, Charu Gupta, Dennis McGilvray, S. Narayan, Sudha Pai, Anand Pandian, Arvind Rajagopal, Ursula Rao and Clarinda Still were similarly willing to overlook—and encourage—our phone fetish. They read things, offered things, made suggestions and put us onto new sources.

We benefited greatly from getting to know the participants at a workshop on cell phones that we ran at the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS) in Singapore in February 2011, sponsored by ISAS, the Australian Research Council and the Ford Foundation. Those participants were Ang Peng Hwa, Shubranshu Choudhary, Subhashish Gupta, Sunil Mani, Janan Mosazai, Nimmi Rangaswamy, Abhishek Sinha, Deepali Sharma, Sirpa Tenhunen, Zhang Weiyu and Ayesha Zainudeen.

From Doron, special thanks go to Ajay ‘Pinku’ Pandey whose ongoing assistance in translation, interviews and friendship proved as invaluable as ever. Others who offered their time and assistance in India include Pradeep Manjhi, Nitya Pandey, Deepak Sahani, Rakesh Singh, Ravi Varma, Samir Singh, Sumit Churasia, Dr A. B. Singh, and Vimal Mehra. Jeffrey is indebted to T. K. Basu, T. V. Ramachandran, Bobby Sebastian,
Gopal Srinivasan, P. Vijayan and T. Willington for connections, directions and instructive conversations. Both of us have benefited from the advice of Anshuman Tiwari.

The people we have named so far do not include dozens of Controllers, Connectors and Consumers of the cell phone who talked to us in settings varying from the slick corporate offices of Oberoi Garden City, Mumbai, to the busy stalls of Daal Mandi, Banaras, or palm-shaded tower sites around Kochi. Some of these debts are recorded in the footnotes. Our
gratitude to so many patient, informative and entertaining people is immense.