Internet on Independence Day (1995)

2004: Facebook Founded
• Date: Feb. 4
• Location: Cambridge, Massachusetts
Mark Zuckerberg, a 23-year-old Harvard University student, creates “The facebook,” a local social networking site named after the orientation materials that profiles students and faculty and given to incoming college freshmen. Sixteen years later, Facebook has become an $843.6 billion digital advertising behemoth so integral to many people’s lives that it has been criticized for helping foreign powers and propagandists influence the U.S. political system.
2007: The iPhone
• Date: Jan. 9
• Location: San Francisco
Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who died in October 2011, first shows the world one of the most popular branded consumer electronic devices in history, the iPhone. Since the first generation phone that Jobs introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show that year, there have been 18 versions of the mobile device, and more than 1.2 billion units have been sold globally through 2017. Only Samsung's Galaxy smartphone comes close to that volume.
India wins first individual gold at Olympics (2008)
Abhinav Bindra won his gold in the 10m air rifle event
India’s first individual gold at the Olympics came courtesy a young man from Chandigarh who showed the country just what it took to reach the top – determination, hard work, the right training and conditioning, and obsessive focus. If 2021, Tokyo was India’s breakout Olympic Games, then the seeds for that were sown back in 2008, in Beijing, when Abhinav Bindra won his gold in the 10m air rifle event. Bindra had been nudging greatness for some time – he came 11th in Sydney; 7th in Athens; 1st in Beijing; (a disappointing) 16th in London; and then 4th in Rio (his last games). That string of numbers holds in it a message that India is just beginning to understand – the true measure of sporting success for a country is having enough people in the top rung; when that happens, a podium-finish is only a matter of time. And if Bindra’s medal showed Indian sportspeople the limits of the possible, his post-retirement life (including his work on mental illness) has shown them how best to leverage achievement.