After Ajoy’s series was aired on CNN-IBN, I get a feeling that it lacked the killer punch in the presentation. To their credit, it must have taken a lot of guts from the producer to go against the channel’s advertisers and announce it to the world that VSNL Broadband sucks. I am surprised though that a huge majority of the subscribers chose to keep their mouths shut despite the suffering and it took one dedicated spirited Ajoy to stir up the things.
Indians by their own admission are masochistic. They would prefer to suffer ignonomious heaps of abuses rather than stand up for their rights. Maybe, it’s ingrained in their psyche that they are not supposed to question the way things are.
VSNL must be quaking in it’s boots now. A simple Google search would throw up frustrated users bad mouthing the service and calling it as “crap”. For me, I have been documenting the whole process as I see it unfold.
Are the corporate “honchos” illiterate or oblivious to the whole process? This “take it or leave it” attitude pervades all through. Problem is that till the time we all learnt to fight for our genuine rights, nothing is going to come out of the process.
I have seen this problem being replicated on the forums. The moment you put up a request to do something concrete, the thread goes dead.
It is in this pervasive mentality, companies like VSNL survive and almost get away with murder. Most of it’s customers are content with a “working” connection; they would not claim their downtime credits or the speeds they have signed up for.
Broadband remains a pathetic joke and VSNL Broadband remains a perfect example of how bad things can be. Sify is in it’s own league and has a different story to tell. But when it comes from the house of Tatas’ it is shameful on their part to treat customers like a piece of shit. They have big money and big access to levers of power. But what it cannot subvert is the popular opinion and the democratic media (if that exists in the real world). It cannot get away with the crappy services if the customers decide to get together, file a class action suit, spread the word that their services are not up to the mark and take them to task. They are duty bound to get you your services; sadly most of the customers fail to exercise their own right.
