There are some 30 million young voting age citizens of India on Orkut and other social networking sites. Linkedin/MySpace and even Facebook are marginal blips in the popular Indian Internet scene. Compared to fan groups of popular music directors and cricketers the indian political groups on orkut happen to really tiny and community engagement levels are really low or discussions do not have much depth. Most of the young citizens from educated classes either do not vote at all( most haven't even registered themselves as voters) or have pitifully low attention span for politics.
So is there a huge audience for such a site ? Sure there is a possible audience of 30-40 million young voters.

Is it possible to sell a political platform to existing popular political parties ? Political parties in India haven't been known to pay for any technology except for un-solicited SMS'es and un-solicited voice spam. From my personal experience, some of the party organizations can be really corrupt with each decision maker marking up price of your services at next level until it reaches a political party's 'high command'. So you can't sell the services or give them for free with an agreement to monetize it on their behalf very easily. The existing political parties are all too corrupt for their own good.
Can emerging educated class parties/groups in India buy into it? Most of these parties are from people with IT background or friends in IT. Most haven't gone beyond rudimentary shared hosting sites and haven't created enough engagement to need to scale up their platforms as yet.

changeindia.in
jago.in
lok-paritran.org

So according to me the marketplace for political platforms doesn't exist today. You can't really offer say a USD100/mo(+usage) hosted social web political platform to rich politicians who would buy it online. Internet using politicians do not yet exist in India, the cost of making such sales to dinosaurs is simply too high as of today.

Whether the delimitation of constituencies in favor of urban areas is going to change this in a significant way is still to be played out in next 2 general elections over next 6 years or so,

We are an experienced startup team looking for interns/parttime/telecommute workers for some exciting web 2.0 projects we are executing.

If you love to use Orkut, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Flickr etc. and would love to create similarly exciting social networking and Web 2.0 products for the web then here is your chance to be a part of action. Google.com came out of an initiative by two students to create a university wide search. We believe in such initiatives, where there is a compulsion to use the web for something useful.

Whats the deal :
You get:
1. Equity amount depending upon the time commitment you can offer and efficiency of your effort.
2. Experience in bootstrapping a Web 2.0 startup
3. Understanding how to create web scale, high usage, social networking site
3. Lifetime bragging rights, "I helped create this cool site you so love to use"
4. Learn and utilize highly marketable Open Source and technology skills like Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Memcache, nginx, flex etc.

We get:
1. Self motivated force multipliers
2. Potential employee pool from which to hire after we get funded.

What are we looking for :-

1. Hardcore geeks into Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails and even Java or with willingness to rapidly learn Ruby on Rails framework.
2. Creative folks who create publicity material with Adobe Photoshop/Pagemaker/Gimp etc. including websites/brochures/copy during college technical fests and would like to try their hand at Human Computer Interaction workflows for a Web 2.0 site and learn in depth XHTML+CSS+Javascript, AJAX, Jquery, YUI etc.

Who should apply :-

0. These are telecommute positions.
1. This is not a training we are looking for fairly self-motivated individuals who can learn on their own without any hand holding. It doesn't matter if you have no industry experience.
2. You should have access to a broadband connection with no download limits and either your own personal PC where you can use Linux environment (or a Virtual Machine with Linux). Or a University/College infrastructure where you have private diskspace (for storing the code) associated with your login account on a secure file server.
3. You shouldn't be encumbered by any Intellectual property, Proprietary rights and Non-disclosure agreements to work in your own time on any project and be able to assign the moral rights of the same to us in lieu of equity into a startup company. We may at our discretion release parts of the projects executed under Open Source Licenses.

So if you want to contribute to an exciting early stage startup for equity then e-mail us at tarundua at tarundua dot net

NIXI Fee Structure based on ports. What? Does a managed switch cost them a lot less to maintain if they configure it at a speed of 2Mbps. Did someone explain to NIXI that their aim is not to be a for-profit company, and they shouldn't be buying 2Mbps transit bandwidth but figuring out how to peer the ISPs at multi-100-megabit speeds by asking government/BSNL to subsidize transit for small ISPs/Content producers/hosts/Open Source software mirrors through leased line circuits over citywide metro-ethernet(s) they have created.

ISPs will continue to pay lip-service to NIXI, until more IT managers buying premium corporate bandwidth start asking tough questions about local peering, which incidentally affects the quality of service for their users more than an average home user. More often than not I used to get clueless looks from salespeople who came to sell bandwidth when asked about peering in India. Some of higher-ups in the ISPs would claim to have several E1 circuits to the NIXI(not at which POP and which ISP's do they actually peer with).

For sure an ISP letting botnet infected subscribers continue to connect to Internet, shoving more DDOS/SPAM traffic to other ISPs should be paid at the rate of Rs. 50/GB, talk about incentives for evil

Would someone file an RTI query(I am too lazy a blogger) with BSNL, MTNL and NIXI as to what port speeds and at what POPs (Point of Presence) do the ISPs with largest number of Broadband subscribers connect peer at with which other ISPs.

The prices of co-location in India do not provide enough incentive for content providers to move content from US/Europe to India not even for content hosts in say geographically close countries like Bangladesh, Vietnam, Thailand etc. The Indian non-IT content companies do get taken in by the promise of lower latency(due to geographical closeness) from Indian datacenters to indian subscribers but it ends up being an endless wait for promised future improvement in services(or perhaps Datacenters are able to blame it away on poor last mile connectivity, or the content hosts never saw what local content delivery should look like with local hosting).

Is it so hard to figure out that NIXI trying to act as a carrier neutral telecom hotel for content hosting instead of a Peering POP will not work.

To use Airtel blackberry as a softmodem. Follow the howto or here for linux using xmblackberry.
The modem initialization parameters for airtel are
+CGDCONT=1,"IP","airtelgprs.com" and the number to dial is *99# and no username and password is needed.
I am able to use ssh though there is high latency but haven't been able to use PPTP based VPN which runs on protocol 47(GRE) over IP directly, although I suspect an SSL based VPN might work.

Update:
Yes you need to install the Desktop Manager as well and make sure you can access your blackberry from the Desktop Manager.