The year was 1987.

A year of many momentous events:

* Dow Jones Index closed over 2,000 for the first time.

* Perl programming language came into being.

* British writer Alistair Maclean passed away.

* Work on the Channel Tunnel began.

* I had my first glimpse of a very backward Indian village.

* And Prema Loka, the lovely Kannada film was released.

Featuring Juhi Chawla and Ravichandran, Prema Loka was a smashing success. Its songs were on every lip in Karnataka from Bangalore to Manvi (in Raichur district). Our favorite song in Prema Loka was Nodamma Hudugi.

Juhi Chawla looks like a Million Dollars in the song. See for yourself by clicking the image below.

Iconic American motorbike company Harley Davidson is still keen on entering India despite the trade barriers, says LiveMint, Hindustan Times‘ new business daily.

C-DOT hangs up on 3-G, reports the Hindu Businessline.

IBM VC group eyes India, according to the Economic Times.

Shiromani Akali Dal working president Sukhbir Badal has rolled out a Rs 350 billion economic blueprint for Punjab, reports the Hindustan Times. Badal is the son of Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal.

By now, virtually all of us have received an e-mail from someone in Nigeria offering to share his millions with us if only we would send him some details - ideally a Western Union money transfer or other forms of payment “to cover some local processing fees.”

But scam artists from Nigeria are not new. They’ve been with us for nearly four decades decades. True.

In a 1969 New York Times article, an American banker Birtan Aka visiting India lamented the problems Philadelphia businesses faced in dealing with some Nigerian companies.

 ”They just have an office address - a front,” [Aka] said. “They write to a small businessman here asking to buy perhaps $5,000 worth of his products and enclose impressive-looking drafts with statements about guarantees and pasted with beautiful official-looking stamps.” It’s all a fraud, she added. The goods are shipped but the drafts are fakes.

“Lately, they have been hitting small textile plants,” she said.

As you can see from the above NYT excerpt (story originally published on November 16, 1969), Nigerian scams are hardly new. Only as technology evolves, the Nigerian scamming techniques also evolve.

Talk of crooks keeping pace with technology.

Mercury News a few months ago had a story on the rush of VCs to India and the “new garage culture” of the start-ups in Bangalore and elsewhere a la Silicon Valley.

In the first nine months of 2006, VCs have made 53 early-stage investments in Indian start-ups worth $355 million — nearly twice as much activity as the two previous years combined, according to Venture Intelligence, a Chennai-based research service focused on private equity and venture capital activity in India.

With the Indian culture worshipping success and stigmatizing failure, it remains to be seen how the environment responds to the inevitable failures.

Also with basic infrastructure still pitiful, it’s hard to believe that “a new garage culture” will take roots in Indian cities like Bangalore and Hyderabad.

At least that’s the conclusion of a Tehelka.com story on the reach and use of the Internet in Bihar’s hinterlands, far from the state capital Patna.

Nineteen-year-old Swati Jha is in her final year of BSc, and is an ardent Internet user. “It’s a wonderful world, and life without the Internet would just be dark, dark and dark,” she says.

As elsewhere, chatting, porn and job-hunting seem to be the favorites of surfers in Bihar’s hinterlands too. 

Such is the lure of the Internet that young students like Mohammad Azharuddin from  Haripur Mazrahi village in Kaluwahi township travel 20 kilometers to Madhubani to get online.

“I just cannot afford to stay offline as my friends in Western countries would miss me a lot….The Internet is very much part of my life now. I have bought my iPod from an online store and these days I am examining the features of various Blackberry models on the Net.”

You can read this interesting piece at Tehelka.