From the media

They popped open the bottle of champagne. And then Donna and David Galler handed over their newly-christened baby, Darby, to her godfather, Anish Nanda. As the little girl gurgled the window at the Atlanta skyline and thought to himself, "I can't believe this is happening..."

It all started a year ago in a tiny flat in Powai, a suburb in Mumbai. It was around midnight the time that Nanda, a 27-year-old cyber-junkie, usually sat down with his computer to explore the tangled, absurd, fantastic world of cyberspace. He entered a 'chat room ' - which is a space where people can hav conversations by sending each other written messages - on Live Wire!, his bulletin board service, and encountered a woman. Their online conversation went something like this: "My name is Donna. My husband and I live in Atlanta. He's an attorney and I am a private detective. We are trying to adopt an Indian baby girl. We don't want to go through an agency here because they are a rip-off. I've tried calling this adoption centre we heard about in Nagpur, but we are having a language problem. Can you help us?"

Nanda sat up. This wasn't the usual "Hi! My name is Christina. What are your favourite rock groups?". Type of message that he was used to. So he immediately typed back: "Sure,I can help you. Why don't you e-mail me the details."

They did, and what followed was an arduous six months involving numerous e-mails, legal documents, medical tests and government approvals. Nanda become the go-between, translator and general guide for the American couple. Eventually, the Gallers flew down to Mumbai to pick up the baby. The night before they went back, they took Nanda out for dinner and announced that they would like him to be their baby's godfather.

"I was honoured." recalls Nanda." In America,the godparents are usually old family friends or close relatives... I was just someone they had 'met' in cyberspace."

But clearly, the Internet is connecting people in ways that were previously unimaginable. Closer to home, a fast-growing number of people are getting hooked on to butting board services (BBS) which are smaller, more intimate, local version of the Internet. A BBS is a network of computers which as the name suggests, provides a forum for people to post notes, write messages and exchange ideas. But rather than a physical board with drawing pins. It is an electronic space that appears on your computer screen, accessible through a modem. Bulletin boards also carry select websites that have been downloaded from the worldwide web.

There are about 30 such local internets in the country ranging from Way Out Wild (WOW), a small Mumbai BBS catering largely to college students (and run by an enterprising 18-year-old) to Status, a Delhi based BBS with nodes in seven other cities, which clams to have over 9,000 users country-wide. Then there is Live Wire! based in Mumbai, which also operates in others cities, including Madras, Baroda and Ahmedabad (where a common on line pastime is Antakshari!).

They cater to people who want a taste of the Internet, but are intimidated by its vastness, find it too impersonal and of course, extremely expensive (it costs Rs 15,000 per year through VSNL).

For many users, bulletin boards are just a cheap way of getting e-mail access. "I needed a communication tool" says Dev Vaidya, an executive with Zandu Pharmaceutical Works. "The Internet was too expensive. This was the simple solution." Vaidya gets hundreds of e-mail messages from drug companies across the world seeking information on ayurvedic remedies. He even communicates with his wife while she away in Ahmedabad via e-mail every day to save on phone calls.

In fact, contrary to most other technological advances BBSes are inadvertently reviving the art of letter writing. People who had transformed communication into a series of sound-bites barked into a phone receiver, are now composing long letters. Others spend hours typing out their most intimate secrets in the BBS forums and chat rooms. "You're not as restrained or shy when you're talking on the computer" says Yazad Dotivala, a 19-year old student who spends half-an-hour a day logged on to Live wire! In fact, many confess that they find it easier to say things if they remain faceless and voiceless. When they get in front of their terminals, they slip into anonymity, using uncanny aliases (for instance, there's an old man who calls himself 'Yoda', and a young girl whose net-name is 'Rainlady').

"That's why the first golden chat rule is 'never meet the people you chat with'." laughs Vaidya. Yet, a group of bulletin board users decided to break the norm and had a party recently. "Everyone was totally different from what the others had expected. But at the end of it we become friends."

Because it's a local network, BBS subscribers often end up meeting each other-sometimes under the strangest circumstances. That's what Alok and Anjali Sinha, who run Status, the Delhi-based bulletin board service, found out. When a very pregnant Anjali woke up in the middle of the night in the night in severe pain, it so happened that Alok was communicating with a doctor online. Alok said he would have to log off to take his wife to the hospital. "No need," typed back the doctor. "You won't find any specialists at this time of night. Just tell me what her symptoms are." The doctor ended up spending the entire night passing on information through the computer to help her cope with her problem.

BBSes are changing the way people communicate in India. "This technology is here to stay," says Pravin Gandhi, technology columnist and chairman of Integra Techsoft, a Bangalore company. "Now society must decide how best use it."