■"Rural India Goes Digital: Satellite TV Pushes Into Remote Areas, Meeting Pent-up Demand," by John Larkin, Wall Street Journal, 4 October 2005, p. A15.

India, despite the high-tech and the "Shining India" of recent boom years, is massively rural still in its population spread. Until recently, those poor people got two dull state TV channels and that was about it.

Now digital satellite's busting out all over the place, and its impact is profound. I lived in a remote area growing up, and I remember what it was like when cable first appeared. It was indeed wild compared to what we had previously known.

What happens when very traditional social scenes are given access to a huge new array of information sources? Here's a great example:

Indeed, Mr. Thakor, the Lodra farmer, has used information gleaned from his village's new Doordarshan service to purchase a new type of cattle feed that produces more milk from his cows and makes his family an extra 45 rupees a day. He plans to use the extra cash to finance a truck purchase under a promotion he also saw on TV.

I lived a summer in the Soviet Union, still a decently robust authoritarian state at that point (although I admit to flashbacks whenever I bump into the idiocy that is TSA), and what I remember most is this: you were totally in the dark on consumerism there. It was stunning. You simply had no idea from any TV or newspaper or radio where to go to buy stuff you needed or just wanted. Instead, you wandered around the city, gossiping constantly with everyone, trying to figure out where stuff could be had. It was stunningly inefficient, and I was constantly flabbergasted by the desert-like deprivation of ads, having grown up expecting to have this info thrown at me day-in and day-out. Mind-numbing to most, until you're forced to go without it cold turkey. Then, my friends, you'll be amazed how much you'll miss it.

India's rural poor have a pent-up consumerism that will match everything we saw with China's rural poor when ag reforms turned those people loose as well (all those pix of the farmer dragging a big TV home on his cart).

In 20 years, just like with China, the world will be looking at a TV market in India that's as big or bigger as any in the world-and one full of people wanting to spend money. Smaller amounts, granted, but then do the per capita math.