The backdrop of this ancient scenery is dominated by a giant billboard from the mobile carrier Vodafone (NYSE: VOD).  And on the sidewalk, where men in wet orange T-shirts pass by after their spiritual bath in the Ganges River, a young entrepreneur has set up a booth on two wheels, which carries only two stationary telephones on a counter.  This is a mobile phone recharging station, where consumers can add credit to their prepaid cell phones.

This is Varanasi, a few hundred miles East of Delhi.  A deeply spiritual city.  It embodies the amazing contrasts in India.  In Bhutan and Nepal, I saw how mobile phones seamlessly integrate into highly traditional settings, with monks at temples using the latest Nokia (NYSE: NOK) or iPhone, or Himalayan Sherpas using satellite phones.  But in India, outside Delhi, the contrast sometimes reached an almost unreal level.  While India has leapfrogged in economic terms over the last years (GNP growth of 8-9% annually), a large part of the 1.2 billion Indians are still living below any standards we can imagine in the West.  And despite that, the piece of personal technology people buy as soon as they can afford any (maybe after a TV set for the household), is a cell phone.  Why?  Landline phones and broadband connections take long or are hard to get at all in India; text messaging is economical; and much of life is happening outdoors.  So, India had only 3.4 million PC broadband subscribers in early 2008, and less than 60 million people are using the stationary internet - that’s 5% of the population.  But 300 million people in India have a cell phone.  Since April 2008, there are more cell phone users in India than in the United States.

The whole country is making mobile a natural priority.  Wherever I went, it was obvious, all the way to overcrowded and old Indian trains.  My 14 hour overnight train did not have a restaurant car or a bathroom as we know it.  But it did have power plugs built in at each air-conditioned seat, with a metal plate next to it.  It didn’t say “computer power plug,” or “shaving power plug” (which would have been appropriate for these slow-moving overnight trains), but simply and only:  “mobile charging points.”

Small shops in Delhi run by youngsters in the back alleys next to century old barber shops are specializing in “cell phone repair” – chip sets and replacement shells for every major mobile phone are available.  Every 3rd TV commercial in India, it seems, is for mobile phones or mobile service.  Text messaging shortcodes are used in every other TV program, be it to request news alerts, play games or order ringtones.  Newspapers invite text and picture messaging on their front page.

The next revolution coming to India is likely the use of the cell phone for the mobile web.  It will play a different role here than in the West, as the only major form of internet access for many people.  Thus, the business models of the mobile web will likely be much more pure-play mobile here, and not as much cross-platform-based (online and mobile combined) as in the West.

Growth in mobile is still pretty unlimited. Only a little more than every 4th person in India owns a cell phone so far, so every month, 8 to 9 million new subscribers sign up.  Pyramid Research estimated recently that 87 per cent of the next billion mobile subscribers will come from emerging economies; and India, not China, will add the most new subscribers, it said.

In the meantime, in Varanasi, mobile use is going to lengths that left me stunned at times.  While families where in the middle of spiritual burning death ceremonies for their loved ones outdoors at the Ganges river, bystanders happily kept chatting away on their mobile phones.”