Marx, now long forgotten by most who spoke his name but a decade or two ago, once said the following in his brilliantly allegorical essay on the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. “Bourgeois revolutions...storm quickly from success to success; their dramatic effects outdo each; men and things set in sparkling brilliants; ecstasy is the everyday spirit; but they are short-lived; soon they have attained their zenith, and a long crapulent depression lays hold of society before it learns soberly to assimilate the results of its storm-and-stress period”.

In Asia, reeling under the current crisis, the moment of ecstasy has long passed, and the ‘long crapulent depression’ is here to stay. India, a poor cousin of the East Asians, tried to ignore the crisis through its traditional west-centeredness. But the crisis has finally arrived in South Asia, the Indian rupee has dived steadily since last year and inflation is  raging. But in the area of electronic capitalism, the mood is buoyant. Software stocks have risen 120 percent and soon software will become India\'s largest export. 

Many fables have emerged as a response to the irruption of electronic capitalism in a country where 400 million cannot still read or write. The first fable is a domesticated  version of the virtual ideology. In this Indianised version, propagated by the technocratic and programming elite, India\'s access to western modernity (and progress) would obtain through a vast virtual universe, programmed and developed by \'Indians\'. The model: to develop techno-cities existing in virtual time with US corporations, where Indian programmers would provide low-cost solutions to the new global techno-space.

The second fable is a counter-fable to the first and quite familiar to those who live in the alternative publics of the net. This fable comes out of a long culture of Old-Left politics in India and draws liberally from 1960\'s dependency theory. The fable, not surprisingly, argues that India\'s insertion in the virtual global economy follows traditional patterns of unequal exchange. Indian programmers offer a low-cost solution to the problems of transnational corporations. Indian software solutions occupy the lower end of the global virtual commodity chain, just as cotton farmers in South Asia did in the 19th century, where they would supply Manchester mills with produce.  

All fables are not untrue, some more \'true\' than others. Thus the second fable claims, not unfairly, that most Indian software is exported, and there is very little available in the local languages (ironically the Indian language versions of the main programs are being developed by IBM and Microsoft!). 

The alternative vision posed by the second fable is typically nationalist. Here India Old Media/New Media Ongoing Histories / 93 Recycling Modernity Pirate electronic cultures in India RAVI SUNDARAMwould first concentrate on its domestic space and then forge international links. In a sense both fables suffer from a yearning for perfection. While the first promises a seamless transition to globalism, the second offers a world that is autarchic. Both are ideological, in the old, 19th century sense of the term, which makes one a little uncomfortable. “Down with all the hypotheses that allow the belief in a true world”, once wrote Nietzsche, angrily.

There is no doubt that for a ‘Third World’ country, India displays a dynamic map of the new techno-cultures. The problem for both the fables mentioned above is that they remain limited to the elite domains of techno-space in India. This domain is composed of young, upper-caste, often English-speaking programmers in large metropoles, particularly emerging techno-cities like Bangalore and Hyderabad. This is the story that Wired loves to tell its Western audiences, but in a critical, innovative sense most of these programmers are not the future citizens of the counter net-publics in India.