Dotcom world

THERE is another dotcom universe far removed from the boom or bust syndrome that the pink papers are full of. It survives without venture capital, and is unaffected by the stock market. More often than not the websites that inhabit it are financed out of personal savings and nurtured on a fortuitous blend of idealism and optimism. They chug along, slowly accumulating hits and winning friends. Sometimes they are abandoned, but stick around in cyberspace like ghosts with addresses.

In 1996, when I first started writing about the Internet it was usually the diaspora that was behind the burgeoning websites focussing on Gujarat, Orissa, Goa or Punjab. Homesick Indians who, as a wag said recently, found their love for their homeland growing in direct proportion to their distance from it. But now many of these sites have been abandoned and there are others taking their place which originate right here: in India that is Bharat.

The great thing about the Web is that it costs little, sometimes nothing, to fulfil individual publishing aspirations. Go in for free web hosting, write all or most of the material yourself, acquire enough web-designing skills to maintain your site, and put in any spare energy that is left into publicising it. These sites aim not so much to make money as to win friends and influence people. Almost all of them dream of breaking even and being profitable some day, though some of these have not got a hope in hell of doing so.

Biharee Babu will not reveal either his real name or where he actually lives. But he has some four or five sites on the Web of which www.bihareebabu.com is regularly maintained. Though he says he just scrapes together a living, he has hosted and created the site out of his personal funds. Who maintains it? "Just me. It is all purely a labour of love, motivated by a deep, and abiding, love for the land of my birth, and a deep sense of despondency at how it has been taken to the gutter by unscrupulous, self- centered, criminal-politician nexus."

There is a Bihari diaspora out there that shares his despondency and logging into the discussion board can be quite instructive. The postings here are likely to have titles such as "How to improve Bihar" or "What ails Aryavarta." And the denizens who debate these issues usually hail from the United States or the United Kingdom. Ninety per cent of his visitors are non-resident Indians.

Somebody from Bridgewater, New Jersey, wants the "holy land of Mithila" to be liberated from "the bloody and stinking dirty hands of Rabri and Laloo". The rest of his message debates the cultural differences between Mithila and the rest of Bihar. Then the debate is joined by a woman from San Diego who reels off facts and figures to give the rest of the history of "the great holy land of King Janak, Mithileshwar." As the creator of this website puts it, it is aimed at all those who are interested in Bihar, and want to provide hope to the youth of Bihar and restore in them a sense of pride, which they sorely lack at the present.

A more upbeat venture is the site called Banglahaat, which is actually attempting to do on the Net what the Bengali regional TV channels are doing: uniting Bengalis worldwide in a cultural experience. Debashis Sen, a journalist with some experience in a software company, says the idea occurred to him while shopping for prawns with his wife in Delhi's INA market. He had the bright idea of starting a web site on Bengali food.

He then searched on the Internet and found to his surprise that he could bring out a weekly web magazine on the Internet for Bengalis living in Bengal as well as those living away from Bengal. "I realised there is a scope to cater to all Bengalis cutting across geographic regions. That too, without any expensive advice from the bright boys of Mckinsey!"

Banglahaat (www.banglahaat.com) is a weekly international magazine for Bengalis in English on the Internet. Sen has his marketing line pat:"No one covers the world of Bengalis the way we do." He says that more than a lakh highly qualified and upmarket Bengalis from 29 countries visit Banglahaat in a month. It is a weekly e-zine with channels which cover business, society, rituals, cinema, theatre, music, football, politics and the success stories of Bengalis. And of course food and poetry.

He had got together some high profile columnists to contribute, and has adopted the concept of a virtual office to save costs and time of traveling to office. It is funded by Sen and his friends from savings that they accumulated after paying tax. "Our business philosophy is simple, spend as much as you could afford." www.assam.org you discover is another venture initiated more by idealism than profit motive. Though the webmaster here never replied to queries, what could be discerned was that this site was begun to put Assam, its news and culture on the web, and its initiators are trying hard to finance it by linking up with product sales through the site.

Meawhile, S. Sudhir, a 29-year-old telecom engineer from Thiruvananthapuram with an MBA to his credit, set up www.sites4india.com while waiting for the Kerala Government to finance his small scale unit. "I thought I will try to disprove that a dot com operation requires lot of cash and only big people can do it. I thought I will get some encouragement from the Government because mine is a SSI." He started it with less than Rs. 10,000 in his pocket and a computer. The Kerala Government however was not impressed and the financing never came.

Then he went ahead and used the data he had collected while researching the web for a year and a half to set up this portal for web surfers looking for web addresses of sites relevant to India. "Already I have people mailing me addresses of their portals to include in my Web directory." But he does not know just how much of a response it is getting. "I cannot get the statistics of people visiting my site since I have to shell out Rs. 1000 for that. I hope to get it next month."

His dream is to launch tourism portals for the Andamans and the Nicobar Islands which he thinks are based on sound revenue models. But the Kerala Venture Fund has not warmed up to his idea. Meanwhile, he says, he had to land in Chennai last week to take up a job in a Singapore IT company "as I have to survive." And get the money for the software to track hits.

SEVANTI NINAN

E-mail the writer at sevantininan@vsnl.com

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