The obsession with English

and, how that is a show-stopper for internet penetration in India

Irrespective of what data you believe, only a minuscule percentage (less than 2%) of the population in India is "connected". Even among the folks who are online, very few use the internet for doing anything other than checking email sporadically. This does not count the folks who have to log-in at work in furtherance of their company's business. I seriously believe this has to do with the lack of availability of compelling, appropriate local content. As we think of bringing internet to the villages, we need to figure about what they are going to use the internet for and what kind of education, information and entertainment can be served up to them in local language. This is as relevant for the villages as a vast majority of folks living in our towns and cities.
While the accent of all the policy directives seems to be on the "hardware"- connect more villages, make more low cost computers available etc, a strong push on local language content availability which educates, informs and entertains (a la local language television) is needed to ensure true internet penetration and usage among a much larger percentage of the population.

It does not have to be the net..

.. but

Think of the dialog process again. When did you last carry out a conversation where you spoke a sentence or a paragraph and waited for th answer for a week or two? This is what you must do when you depend on a paper mailer to communicate.

How many customers will take the trouble to write back to you in response if they had to depend on putting pen to paper?

Accept it. The net is the reality. And the reality is that every time you are sending a mailer out to hundreds of customers, you are creating opportunities to have conversations with them; not one way, not one-off. Will the conversations be in tens in number or hundreds or in thousands? How meaningful will they be? How much will they advance your communication objective? That will depend on how prepared you are with relevant, precisely targeted content that enable this whole dialogue process. 

More conversations with your prospects/ customers and more meaningful ones at that. Will you sell more or less as a result?