Free Cell Phone Nation: How Mobile Phones Have Revolutionized Business, Politics and Ordinary Life in India by Robin Jeffrey Page B

people directly connected with aspects of mobile telephony, and we enjoyed informal conversations with scores of others. It was difficult to talk to us in India without being interrogated about cell phones and what they meant for the person who had fallen into our inquisitive clutches. We read everything we could find on the spread of mobile phones elsewhere in the world and came to admire the work of analysts like Manuel Castells, Jonathan Donner, Heather Horst, Daniel Miller, James Katz, Rich Ling, Howard Rheingold and others. Those debts are recorded in notes and comments in the following chapters. We culled major newspapers and periodicals and drew on government documents and the publications of businesses and non-government organisations. The Web makes some of this work quicker and easier than it would have been twenty years ago. But sitting at a computer screen is a poor substitute for visiting a crowded training institute for aspiring technicians on the outskirts of Banaras or trailing behind an engineer as he walks through a rubber estate in Kerala to inspect the air-conditioning unit that cools one of his transmission towers.
    The writingof Cell Phone Nation proved as joint a project as one can imagine ‘joint authorship’ being. As the structure of the book evolved, one of us took responsibility for writing the first draft of particular chapters. Doron wrote first drafts of chapters dealing with the social uses of mobile phones; Jeffrey started chapters on history, politics and marketing. The other author then took the first draft and objected, deleted, edited and added. It was a bit like planting a garden or playing pingpong. One author planted, the other weeded, added his own favourites and turned the plot back to the originator to go through the weeding-and-planting process again. The pingpong ball went back and forth across the net many times, and we infected each other with daily doses of enthusiasm.
    We aimed to write a book that would hold up its head as both sound scholarship and engaging reading. Our potential readers were us: curious people, eager for understanding and intolerant of jargon. We have tried to make the book accessible. Mobile telephony produces an ABC of acronyms; we have tried to use them sparingly and have provided a list of Abbreviations for quick reference. Similarly, the Glossary contains words that may be unfamiliar to people who are not electronics engineers as well as to people who are not Indians or Indophiles. The two Maps provide a reminder of India’s size and diversity and identify the ‘circles’ (geographic units) into which the Government of India has divided, and leased out, the right to use Radio Frequency for mobile telecommunications.
    We have not used diacritical marks for Indian words. When transliterating extended passages from an Indian language, we show long vowels by repeating the letter (for example, ‘aa’), except at the end of words, in which case they are simply ‘a’. For words that are in wide use, we follow common spellings. A ‘wala’ remains a ‘wala’ and the god Ganesh stays ‘Ganesh’, though a more pedantic transliteration would have ‘vaala’ and ‘Gaea’. Official spellings and direct quotations appear as they do in the originals.
    Early attempts to come to terms with issues raised in this book appeared in journals and magazines. We thank the editors of the Journal of Asian Studies, South Asian History and Culture , Pacific Affairs and The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology , as well as various media outlets, for publishing the earlier work and enabling us to develop ideas that we explore here.
    In the Acknowledgements,we thank the host of people whose kindness, patience and knowledge have helped us so generously. Here, we thank the institutions that have supported us: the Australian Research Council, the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University, and the Institute of South Asian Studies and the Asia