Ninth-standard students at Adugodi Government Girls High School edit their documentary on Bangalore’s population explosion. (The scene on the screen shows women fighting for scarce water in the slums.) The filmmaking team is one of 16 in Bangalore creating multimedia projects, supported by my foundation and Adobe.

Bangalore serves succulent (though heavily salted) fish at brilliant prices. Each of these dishes cost roughly $2. The first, the fish pepper at a popular restaurant on Cunningham Road, tasted perfectly moist and spicy after several squirts of lime and a plea to rinse off the salt.

Paramount Hotel’s fish thali required no adjustment except to one’s waistband. Clockwise, starting at 7 o’clock: buttery Kerala parota, masala cabbage slaw, fresh onion and cucumber, fried fish fillet, an Indian chip, three curries (fish, prawn and vegetable), prawn onion stir-fry, yogurt and, at the center, rice topped by caramelized onions. The price included a golf-ball scoop of ice cream topped by bits of fresh pineapple. And a finger bowl.

You’d think that when teaching kids the internet, the problem would be slowing them down.

Not here in Bangalore. At work, we’re running a Yahoo! pilot program to introduce students from eight Karnatakan schools to e-mail and the web. By the end of the two-month test in November, more than 1,000 students should be on chat and Yahoo! groups, collaborating with students across the city on classroom projects. The first step is getting the students e-mail accounts. Easy, until you consider:

1. Few to zero internet hook-ups,
2. Internet firms gone MIA,
3. 10-day school holidays,
4. Index-finger-only typing, and
5. Ignorance of English, the language of the Yahoo! interface.

The result at, for example, Adugodi Government Girls School is this: For each student who has come during the holiday solely to get a Yahoo! account, it takes her nearly 25 minutes to get from e-mail virginity to the send button. Girls struggled to manipulate the mouse, spell their fathers’ names in English letters or remember the passwords they had just created.

Now imagine all 250 students sharing one computer, split into six-hour shifts for five days in a row. You can see why the technology facilitator (blue scarf in photos above) sighed.

Compared to the women back in Amman, women here appear empowered, walking to work and running cash registers. It’s during Dasara that the gap between lower-income men and women in Bangalore becomes obvious. The festival is marked by families across the country, but from the street you’d think it had been declared for men. Men in old white clothes and markedly fewer women in bright saris half-strolled, half-danced along the street, keeping pace by the icons rolling like Thanksgiving floats.