For close to six generations, the Kumbanad family lived in its ancestral village in Kerala. Then, in the 1960s, members of the family began to move out. One of them, C.K. Mathews, moved to Mumbai as a 23-year-old to join the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. Over the years, subsequent generations lost touch with their roots. In 2003, Mathews visited North America on an official tour and stayed with some first cousins. “I met many families of the clan who had no knowledge of the presence of the other families in the same country!” says the 73-year-old, now living in Bangalore. To ensure that the younger members of the Kumbanad family could trace their lineage, a dedicated family website, www.kumbanadfamily.org was set up. And it’s through this website that about 180 members of this 250-year-old clan, spread across 14 countries, keep in touch.
Opening a window: The Gargs named their family blog after their ancestral home in New Delhi. Harikrishna Katragadda / Mint
Nita Mallya, 42, of Phoenix, Arizona, met New Yorker Prathama Rao, 32, her niece by marriage, for the first time about six months ago. The two women and their families have lived in the US for seven years but had never met. Yet, Mallya had no trouble recognizing Rao’s two-year-old son Ravi, even though she had never set eyes on the toddler. Neither did she need to flip through family albums for updates on his “achievements”—she already knew exactly when Ravi’s first tooth came out or when he took his first baby steps. Thanks to the Mallya clan’s Facebook group that Rao set up in 2008, the grand-aunt was completely clued in on the new member of her family.
Social networking, along with online applications, blogs and videos, has revolutionized the way people use the Internet. The phenomenon, often referred to as Web 2.0, saw the Internet transform over the last five years from being just a repository of content to be browsed into a platform for users to create and share information. Blogs have made journalists out of citizens; YouTube has inspired thousands of armchair film-makers; and social networks such as Facebook, MySpace and Orkut have brought together people with shared personal and professional interests. According to an August report by online traffic measurement firm comScore, at least half a billion people visited social networking websites in the six months up to June. By the end of 2008, says a report by market research firm IMRB International, the number of active Indian Internet users alone has nearly touched 50 million.
Social networking has been one of the drivers behind this growth.