Full disclosure: I currently work for a telecom firm, however, these are 100% my personal views alone and not that of my employer or any of the associations I’m a member of.
In the autumn of 2002 I quit 4 years of living in Atlanta and moved back to Mumbai for a job at MIT Media Lab’s India Lab called Media Lab Asia. I was inspired to work there and was treated fairly and felt understood. A year later I said no to a PhD admission back in Atlanta. It was a tough decision because they were willing to pay for my college and living expenses and offering teaching assistantship. Instead I decided to work with a group of IIT Bombay faculty in an Internet for Socio-Economic Development (ICT4D) project where instead of doing something academic in the sense of being limited to a lab/test environment, we would work with real villages, communities and improve their internet access. We created a discussion forum for progressive farmers and over the next decade this would grow to community spread ac…