Online for Summer 1999
by Paramendra Bhagat
October 8, 1999

Where is the Interned headed? ... an article by Paramendra Bhagat

Chaitime.com featured in the Wall Street Journal (February 8, 1999)
Chaitime.com featured in Philly News (November 5, 1999)
Chaitime.com featured in Red Herring (February 2, 2000)

I was with the News Channel of Chaitime.com - Chai meaning tea - the leading South Asian online community, for Summer 1999 in Philadelphia doing a General Studies internship sponsored by my CSC 105 Professor Dr. Jan Pearce and my boss at the Center for Effective Communication Dr. Libby Jones. I worked as a Web Content Producer. I got to know CEO Bhana Grover in March 1998 through a New York Times writer Lisa Napoli - what a random e-mail can do - and kept in touch with her until March 1999 when the company took basic shape. It has not looked back since. Infact a few weeks into the academic year I had Assistant Editor Jenna Milly at CNN Interactive write to me seeking a piece of information for the Indian Elections Special the mammoth news site was about to put out. I was flattered.

It was culturally rejuvenating to spend three months in the fifth largest city in the States and to go to Manhattan and Baltimore and to Ocean City - the longest I have been at the beach - Harrisburg and Pittsburgh, and to get to meet a whole bunch of high school friends and just a whole bunch of South Asians - 90% of the Indian Americans live in the North-East. I had my best meal in three years in Ocean City when a guest of someone from Nepal working at the local amusement park.

In Philly I was living across the street from a high school friend at the Wharton Business School who had found the apartment for me in the first place. We got to plough through a decade worth of memories and emerged more complete.

The company had managed to attract professionals from major corporate brand names and Wall Street and was hoping to dig into the pockets of the millions of South Asians in North America - an average Indian American family happens to earn twice as much as an average European American family, and the Indian Americans are the most wired ethnic group in the US - and go on to ride the wave of the teeming millions waiting to go online over the next few years on the sub-continent itself.

I got to read a ton of news and write commentaries and do some other projects on the side. I got real popular with my colleagues when I got an e-mail from a private secretary to Benazir Bhutto. Writing a highly supportive article on the Harvard-Oxford educated Pakistani politician who has entered perhaps the most difficult phase of her career paid off.

Bill Gates did not comprehend the importance of the Internet as late as 1995. For those who might be starting late one good place to begin is to create a personal homepage - it is now as easy as Microsoft Word - and get a web-based e-mail account and just surf around for a few hours each week.

No matter how fascinating, the Internet is but technology. I want for me a career that is people-centered. With the possible exception of my homevillage in southeast Nepal where else but in Berea can I find 200 people within a square mile I might be on a first-name basis with? At my peak I was on a first-name basis with 300 students on campus. Perhaps I can do more through the Democratic Party than through the Nepal Sadbhavana Party even on issues specific to South Asia. America is a different kind of country from every other, it is a concept, a total spread of democracy and free markets its founding mission.