Author: Tunku Varadarajan
The social-networking giant has opened its first-ever office in Asia—in the country where being all up in one another’s business is practically a birthright.
Facebook and Indians have a magnetic connection. Everyone in my family in India except my father—who, at 77, is entitled to his suspicions of the medium—is a Facebook user. Every single friend of mine in India—except for an eccentric Bengali writer who idolizes a 19th-century British viceroy, Lord Curzon, for which reason he cannot be said to have come to terms with the modern world—is a Facebook user.
Facebook “allows [Indians] to do two things they love: Tell everyone what they are doing; and stick their noses into other people’s business,” says Sree Sreenivasan.
Every single friend of mine of Indian origin, anywhere in the world, is a Facebook user. And a great number of my Facebook “friends” are Indians who, having read my journalism, or seen my name on a sibling’s or (genuine) friend’s page, have sought me out and “friended” me as a reflexive act of connection; and being of Indian origin myself, I’ve always found it infernally hard—if not virtually impossible—to say “no.”
Every single friend of mine of Indian origin, anywhere in the world, is a Facebook user. And a great number of my Facebook “friends” are Indians who, having read my journalism, or seen my name on a sibling’s or (genuine) friend’s page, have sought me out and “friended” me as a reflexive act of connection; and being of Indian origin myself, I’ve always found it infernally hard—if not virtually impossible—to say “no.”
I recite these points because Facebook has just announced that it will shortly open an office in India—its first in Asia—in the southern city of Hyderabad. As an act of outsourcing, the news is unremarkable: Google, Dell, Oracle, IBM, and numerous others have already set up shop in Hyderabad. What catches the eye is that Facebook is, in some inchoate yet compelling way, “coming home”—to the land that embraces it most avidly, to that land where it truly belongs………….
April 3rd, 2010 at 1:38 pm
Well said. I never thought I would agree with this opinion, but I’m beginning to see things differently. I definitely want research more on this as it appears quite interesting. One thing that is unclear to me though is how everything is related together.