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| Gandhi |
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| The
lesser known 'Sabeer Bhatia' |
| Husein
Gandhi is also an Internet prodigy - but in
a twisted sort of way |
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Rohin Dharmakumar
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 No
one symbolises Indian success and enterprise
in the information age better than Sabeer
Bhatia. At an age when most of us were in
college or busy watching movies, Bhatia accomplished
two things that can be called truly world-class.
He started Hotmail, a service that caters
to over 100 million people in more than 30
countries across the world. And not just that
- he made $400 million by selling it to Microsoft!
But was Sabeer Bhatia a flash-in-the-pan entrepreneur
as far as Indian success in harnessing Internet
technologies directed towards end-customers
was concerned? It would seem so, as most Indian
entrepreneurs in 'the Valley' have focussed
on enterprise solutions and not consumer solutions.
Kanwal Rekhi of Excelan, K.B. Chandra- sekhar
of Jamcracker, Vinod Khosla of Sun Microsystems
and Vinod Dham of Intel - most Indian entrepreneurs
have been partial to enterprise solutions.
And so Husein Gandhi came as a surprise.
Husein who? Husein Gandhi - the undisputed
Indian king of spam.
Spam? What's that?
 Okay,
I guess you were asleep for the last couple
of years or so. 'Spam' refers to unsolicited
email, often of a commercial nature, sent
indiscriminately to multiple mailing lists,
individuals, or newsgroups. Put simply, these
are mails you unfailingly find in your inbox
every day from addresses like katie77xxx99@onlineco-eds.com
or viagradeals@ clinic.net asking you if you
"want to have a hot date", want
to "buy herbal Viagra real cheap"
or if you are interested in "getting
out of debt for free".
Spam is more than just a nuisance in case
you were wondering what the big deal was.
Even though it appears so, nothing comes for
free - even on the Internet. Every email you
send (yes, including Hotmail/Yahoo!/Rediffmail)
has to be stored on servers and requires electronic
circuitry to transmit. All that costs money.
In addition, there are hidden costs related
to the corporate email usage caused by spam.
To get an idea of the costs involved just
answer this. How many 'relevant' emails do
you get in a day and how much time does it
take for you to sort through your cluttered
inbox to arrive at them?
To put things in perspective, according to
available statistics, companies the world
over will spend $20.5 billion managing spam
in just 2003. It is also estimated that nearly
half of all the emails that are sent everyday
are spam. AOL and MSN block around 4.8 billion
spam messages a day, and that's not counting
the ones that get through to your inbox.
So that's spam. And Husein Gandhi from Mazgaon,
Mumbai, is the lone Indian on Rokso's list
of the world's worst spammers. Rokso, or the
Register Of Known Spam Operations, is a free-access,
non-profit register of known hard-line spam
operations across the world. This list, complete
with the IP (Internet Protocol) addresses
of the spammers, is used by thousands of mail
servers across the world via a database called
the Spamhaus Block List (SBL) to block spam.
There are around 138 people on the latest
list, and Rokso estimates that these 138 people
are collectively responsible for more than
90% of all spam in the world. These 138 people
choke up your mailboxes and make sure that
you lose at least a couple of productive hours
a day deleting the stuff.
Quick back-of-the-envelope calculations will
show us why Gandhi is big. Ninety per cent
of the total cost of handling spam globally
works out to around $18.4 billion. Assuming
Gandhi's share of the spam pie is only around
5%, he still costs $92.2 million or Rs 434
crore to companies around the world! And mind
you, we are talking big money here.
So now we know that Gandhi is worth $90 million
or so. The only difference with most other
Indian entrepreneurs is that they are worth
that much directly and because they increase
the productivity of companies, while Gandhi
is that much of a cost to others. But hey,
that's real entrepreneurship!
Unlike most other Indian entrepreneurs, information
about Gandhi is tough to come by, primarily
because his profession demands some covertness.
The Rokso site maintains profiles on each
spammer in the list collated through the years
by affected mail administrators and users
all over the world. But even they have only
sketchy details about Gandhi and some of that
information is already outdated. For example,
the phone number the Rokso site lists as Gandhi's
is invalid.
Gandhi used to run a company called Anmol
Solutions, which offered website hosting and
designing services. Now, via Anmol, Husein
offers 'bullet-proof hosting', spammer-speak
for servers that will let you send millions
of unwanted emails a minute without booting
you for such behaviour, from countries like
Brazil and Argentina. Incidentally, the company's
own website, anmol.com, has been taken off
the Net, but a simple Google search will prove
that the company still exists. One of the
few legitimate jobs it undertook some time
back was creating the website of a Mumbai-based
steel trading company.
Gandhi's most notable 'business partner' is
a convicted fraudster and one of the worst
spammers in the world - Alan Ralsky. He has
been operating in the spam business since
1997 and, hence, must be like a father figure
to the relatively young and 'inexperienced'
Gandhi, who is just 25 or 26 years old.
At Elance.com, a company that lets individuals
and companies offer their services at a price,
Gandhi offers bullet-proof hosting among other
things, and claims that "need-based research
and specific tailormade solutions for clients
have resulted in the company's steady growth
over the past five years". He also claims
that he is an MBA from the Mumbai-based Narsee
Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS),
a reputed Indian business school. A little
digging took me to a page at the NMIMS website
which proved Gandhi's claim. He graduated
in marketing in June 2003 from NMIMS after
undergoing his summer training with Blue Star.
So here we have an Indian entrepreneur who
graduated from one of India's leading business
schools and took the road less travelled.
Today, he is among the world's best in his
field. The only problem: he will make it to
the list of the infamous, not the famous.
His profession demands secrecy and the ability
to hide his tracks and he's been able to do
that until now. Is Gandhi really any less
of an entrepreneur than Sabeer Bhatia? In
fact, if anything, he's smarter, though in
a twisted sort of way. Gandhi rides piggyback
on the same product that Bhatia created (Hotmail)
to serve his 'customers'. Parasitic entrepreneurship,
even if it can claim to be world-class.
Kanwal Rekhi, another prolific Indian entrepreneur,
is reported to have once remarked that "the
great thing about American democracy is you
get to vote with your jackpot". Gandhi
is hitting the jackpot - though not in the
way you or I would approve of.
Every day, BW gets a lot of unsolicited articles
through both snail mail as well as email.
Unlike what you may think, we go through them
diligently to see if there are any outstanding
pieces that we should print. Last week, we
found one. This article has been written by
a recent graduate from the Indian Institute
of Management-Calcutta (2001 batch). At present,
he works as a business analyst with a mid-sized
IT services provider called Caritor (formerly
IT Solutions). |
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