Internet on Independence Day (1995)

Internet on Independence Day (1995)
It may not have been obvious at the time but the months of July and August were watershed moments in India’s history. First, in July, then Union communications minister Sukh Ram, placed a call to West Bengal chief minister Jyoti Basu from Sanchar Bhavan in Delhi to Writers Building in erstwhile Calcutta, marking the first mobile phone call in the country. Then, on August 15, Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited launched the nation’s first publicly available internet service. The two revolutions – mobile phone and internet-- worked in tandem over the following two decades as India made the leap from un connected to wireless. In 1995, VSNL had a monopoly on the internet and only allowed a speed of 9.6 kb/s, and ₹5,000 for 250 hours of use. Today bandwidth costs in India are among the lowest in the world, and mobile phones equipped with cheap internet are catalysing a revolution in e-commerce, fintech, entertainment and education.
DDLJ (1995)
A still from the film Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge
The heroine running through fields of mustard, the hero with his outstretched arms, the romantic song-and-dance sequence in a foreign location, the tussle between the pulls of the hearts and the confines of family. If these are Bollywood tropes that sound common, credit one iconic film for it – Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge. When it was released in 1995, a new generation in India was emerging out of the churn of liberalisation. Incomes were rising, foreign products – hitherto made scarce by licence raj – were streaming into India, and it had just become possible for the middle class to also be upwardly mobile. DDLJ channeled the aspirations of this generation into the NRI love story that not only gave the country its most successful Bollywood franchise at the time, but also created a new genre of movies that lasted 20 years. In Raj (Shah Rukh Khan) and Simran (Kajol), the country got a heartthrob on-screen couple and the movie marked the rise of an era where the three Khans – Shah Rukh, Salman and Aamir – would dominate not only the box office but popular imagination and national conversation.