In Mars We Trust - III

I had not really thought I would make a third and even when I originally planned it, the third was not meant to be like this....but there has been this concatenation of circumstances which I really had no control on......I really think this is unmissable.....it's a real-life incident and is just hilarious.....and no, I have not made this up, or exaggerated or anything....

First, I'll post below this a message that a fresher who has just made it to IIMA posted on their Discussion Board.....below that is the reply that a second year student sent to that mail. Go through at leisure....the question posed by this mail really has convinced me that there's no accounting for people and the depths that their IQs slip to.....

The mail:

i need a cell cuz i want to stay in touch with my guy. also i may not be in my room/ be able to come to my room to make/take calls at all times, but i can always carry my cell with me anywhere!!

ofcourse i will get std activated... but messagin u can do only thru a cell...

i get teh point abt matchin networks to reduce cost... n here is my dilemma

my guy has an airtel connection
my dad has a reliance phone
my brother has idea
and our home phone is a tata indicom.

now what???

i need to have teh most cost effective way out...
which wd be covenient fr my parents, bro and guy too!!

help!!!

aditi

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The reply:

This is a very good query. I also faced a lot of problems when I came to IIMA because I wanted to stay in touch with my guy, bhains and bakri (If I had an elephant, it would have been a simple matter of making a trunk call). Considering the reverence that Indian culture accords to the bovine and the divine, staying in touch with cattle is a very important issue.

One needs to only read the Hindi stories of Munshi Premchand, such as Heera Moti and Godaan to realize the deep bonds that people in the cowbelt have for their livestock. Of course, calling Munshi Premchand a Hindi writer is slightly misleading because his writings have a proliferation of Urdu words, reflecting the degree of intermixing between Urdu and Hindi in pre-independence Uttar Pradesh. The alphabet taught in schools during those days began with
Aliph, which interestingly is a derivative of the Greek alpha, which had first made its presence felt in India during the times of Alexander and Selecus Nicator. And perhaps it is divine happenstance that Alexander the Great had to retreat from the Ganges, thereby
completing the UP connection. However the Greek influence in India did not die out with him, his generals (if you are still reading this then I can only wonder how exciting your work is) established mini kingdoms from whatever they could salvage of his victories and particularly interesting is the case of the kingdom of Bactria (in present day Afghanistan), a Greek island in a South Asian sea. The great king Menander of Bactria is the same Milinda, the celebrated king who had a dialogue with the Buddhist sage Nagasena on the semantics of being.

But let me not digress from the core issue, which is your connectivity query. Well as you know, India has undergone a telecom revolution in the past 10 years or so. It all began with the breaking down of the monoploy of the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) and the
establishment of quasi-autonomous bodies like the MTNL and the VSNL. For the purpose of cellular communications, India is divided into a number of contiguous circles, which roughly correspond to the boundaries of the states (which is very convenient considering that the states of India were reorganized on a linguistic basis in the 1950s, thus going to show how farsighted our planners and statesmen were at the time). Initially, for reasons of viable competition, each circle could have 2 private operators and one network from either MTNL or BSNL. At the moment, I think 3 private operators are allowed and plans are to allow a further private player in a circle.

So what you need to do is, locate a map of India, find the telecom cirlces and identify the players operating there. Formulate a matrix to display this information and then apply the concepts of cost minimization (modified simplex method) to identify the optimal network combination for your needs.

Hope that helps..