Computing in India: an Asian elephant learning to dance

To many, India is a land of religious and ethnic conIlict, entrenched and corrupt bureaucracies, and Hollywood-fueled visions of resplendent maliarajahs and palaces in a sea of teeming poverty. Indeed,media coverage of recent events have sustained these images: the 1991 assassination of ex-Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, violent separatist movements in the Punjab and Kashmir, the 1992 stock market scam which implicated top government officials and nearly derailed initiatives to liberalize the economy, the demolition in late-1992 of the Babri Mosque of Hindu religious extremists and the widespread violence that followed.