Almost immediately, I saw the immense potential of this new technology and the way it would change the society and economy but most people around me did not. In fact, even though IBM had already built a website, in India, in its TISL avatar it had no vision at all of doing anything with this new technology. TISL in India was still obsessed with pushing its expensive hardware onto unsuspecting Indian clients. I did try to use a text only browser through the IBM network that had just reached Calcutta but of course, after Mosaic, the experience was pathetic.
Fortunately, at this time, I ran into Jaydeep Mukherjee, who had been my senior in IIT Kharagpur at IIM Calcutta. He was then a partner in the newly formed MCS practice of the audit firm Price Waterhouse and he asked me join his practice in their newly built office in Salt Lake. Leaving a technology giant like IBM and to join a tiny consulting practice of an audit company seemed madness but after talking to Roopen Roy, in his Sukh Sagar office, I took the plunge because Roopen believed in my vision of an internet based eCommerce practice.
But as soon as I had joined Price Waterhouse, I was packed off to a completely different project that was tasked in creating Computer Based Training modules for the SAP practice. First this was a great deviation from my desire to get into eBusiness, second this was not really SAP itself but training material for SAP. I was roped in because with my background in IBM, it would be easy for me to get a visa to go to the US and kick start the project. So with a heavy heart and sense of betrayal I joined the project but then I saw a way to convert this threat to my dreams into an opportunity!
I suggested to Roopen that the CBT project could be done very elegantly if we could set up a digital connectivity between the PW office in Philadelphia and our Salt Lake office using the internet. This would require a radio based, wireless, leased line connectivity between our PW office in Salt Lake and the VSNL office that was also in Salt Lake. The cost for this 64 kbps connection would be an astronomical Rupees Ten Lakhs ( I forget the exact cost) but I managed to convince Roopen that this would greatly facilitate our "off-shore" business.
Back from the US, I ditched the SAP CBT project and got into this connectivity exercise with Chinmohan Biswas and Angshuman Chakravarty as my key collaborators.. First job was to get VSNL connectivity -- which meant signing a mountain of paperwork and agreeing to a draconian contract that threatened a ₹1 crore fine if we diverted traffic outside the office! This connectivity was not easy. The VSNL staff -- who were barely literate in networks matters -- thought that their work was over as soon as the modem in our premises started blinking. Now what? None of us had any clue but after a lot of effort we discovered that we would have to install a DNS server which was something we had never even heard of before.
A machine was procured but how to configure it? And mind you, our internet was not yet operational so that we could not search the web for answers! After a lot of phone calls, we discovered that the NCST in Pune had the expertise to configure the DNS and we begged them to do so. Since we had a leased line we also had a domain PWA.CO.IN and this meant that we were technically a client of NCST who controlled domains in India. That is why NCST agreed to help us. Finally, we connected a Linux machine "in the raw" TCP IP mode -- simply by setting the IP address of the machine to one of the 16 IP addresses that VSNL had given us -- and allowed the gentleman in NCST Pune to access this machine with the root password! That is how he logged into our machine and then installed and configured the DNS server.
The next job was to set up a firewall that would allow any machine in our local area network to connect to the internet. Chinmohan and Angshuman had by then figured out how to install and configure the Gauntlet Firewall Server and this served as a proxy and gateway for all machines to communicate with machines anywhere on the internet.
Getting everyone to browse the web was fine but was more important was the ability to send and receive mail. For this we managed to install and configure a basic linux mail server so that anyone with a userid in the Linux machine would now be able to send a mail with an email id like prithwis@pwa.co.in . Today, this might seem trivial but then this was such a big issue that once this was achieved, we had a grand dinner that night ! We celebrated the fact that we could send a mail from our office to the world.
Then things moved rapidly. Lotus Notes was the preferred platform that Price Waterhouse used to store and transmit documents and information across the world and Roopen Roy was the only person in PW India who could access by using an hideously expensive international phone call to connect to a server in London. Agnimitra Biswas and Shiva(?) helped by connecting a local Lotus Notes server to the internet through our newly installed leased line, now everyone in the company could start using Lotus Notes. Our email id became prithwis@notes.pwa.co.in in line with Price Waterhouse staff in other countries and geographies.
One of the unexpected outcomes of this free and open email was that one of our senior lady colleagues started getting obscene mails from a userid called fakguni@hotmail.com After some investigation I discovered that this man was sitting in an AT&T office and sending anonymous emails. We wrote to the the admin of att.com domain but he never bothered to reply or take any action. So we sent a threatening note to the the offender telling him -- or rather bluffing -- that we knew where he was and the security will catch him soon. We banked on the fact that such people are generally cowards who love to work anonymously but cannot handle exposure. Sure enough, he was soon shitting in his pants and telling us that he had a young daughter at home and that he would not do it again. We left it at that though in reality there was little that we could have done. AT&T security never helped us in any way.
Now that the basic infrastructure of DNS, mail and Lotus Notes server was up and available, the SAP CBT project took off like a rocket on steroids and I was allowed to drift over to my primary love of eBusiness.
My first intention was to create a website for Price Waterhouse but learnt that this was not permissible as per global standards. So I did the next best thing by building my personal website on tripod.com, geocities.com and angelfire.com
In 1997-98, there was hardly anyone in Calcutta who knew let alone used the internet for any kind of business and all my efforts to get some business for Price Waterhouse went in vain. So I decided that we must organize a conference in Calcutta to educate people about this technology and in the process, hopefully drum up some business. Roopen supported the idea but made it very clear that I would have raise the requisite money from the participants. The company was prepared to offer only non-monetary, moral and material, support.
Inspired by the magician PC Sorcar's brand Indrajaal, I coined the phrase Yantrajaal -- the network of devices -- to represent the internet and the conference was called the Yantrajaal conference. This was a paid conference, not a free one, and I was surprised and delighted when nearly 100 people signed up to attend the event in Science City.
Unfortunately, I do not have any of the presentations that were made in the conference but there was some money that was left over at the end and guess how did I spend it? I used it to purchase the yantrajaal domain from the InterNIC in the US for the princely sum of USD 35 per year. The idea was to have a similar conference every year but unfortunately, that was the first and the last!
However, I decided to create my own personal website using this domain name and since 1999, this website, www.yantrajaal.com has been my personal portal and storehouse of my thoughts and ideas.
