Internet is here to stay. The presence of Indians on the World Wide Web is increasing rapidly. A year ago an Altavista search for “Noor Inayat Khan” yielded no results. Today the same search brings over a hundred entries.

There is a cyber-café in every street nowadays. “Dotcom” has become a common lingo even in the small towns. The Internet fever has gripped the people of India like Malaria… propagated not by the mosquito bites but by the bits and bytes of information travelling across the globe at velocities comparable to that of light.

How is our life affected because of this revolution?

My eighteen-year-old cousin doesn’t go after girls any more. His evenings are spent in the cyber cafes. (He quipped one day that the plural of cyber café should “cyber caves!”) He tells me that dating a girl online is much more fun. “Of course, it is more convenient and fun” he says, “Especially your purse need not be bulky.” He spends eight hours in sleep, four hours in front of his home PC playing Prince of Persia or Quake-III, seven hours sitting on his college desk dreaming about his scheduled chat with the girl who added him as a buddy in Yahoo Instant Messenger, two hours cyber-surfing, one hour talking about it on the phone with his friends and two hours eating strange food.

If we scrutinize his daily activities we see that there is absolutely no physical exercise. He is simply too busy for all that. If it continues like this, perhaps we will be evolving into Net-beings who have a big head, two big palms, very small legs and very small hands. Darwin’s theory confirms this. There won’t be any difference between us and the Martians after that.

E-Commerce could not catch up that fast in India. This is because of the attitude of Indian public who cannot relish the idea of buying something without looking at the product directly, without that “touch test.” What if the product that’s shipped is bad?

Of course, there is something called a return policy but why take all these pains? Why not go to the nearest Mall and buy it? Also the number of people who know what a credit card is, forget about having one, is quite less. Even in Bangalore, most of those brilliant software engineers working for top-notch companies don’t possess a credit card. Without a Credit Card, you can’t even think of shopping online.

But as they say, things do change! There will surely be a day when E-Commerce will drive many big business magnets out of the race; make many tech-savvy computer professionals millionaires and deliver top quality goods to the satisfied consumer. The Internet industry is going places… It will definitely make us closer to the Martians both physically and mentally one day.