Indian Rickshawallas ‘Twitter’
By Sunil Bhargava

A few days ago I decided to try out twitter and came across an interesting post by Josh Kopelman titled ‘Some new thoughts on the Atomization of Conversation’.  Here is a part of the post: “On Sunday morning, our seven-year old daughter awoke with sharp pain in the lower right-hand corner of her stomach. Fearing appendicitis, we took her to the hospital, and they operated. I canceled my calls and meetings and basically disconnected from the Internet for the week. The only hint I gave was a brief Twitter message.

My wife also cleared her calendar — but she provided some Facebook updates about the situation.

And what happened next really amazed me. Her phone started ringing with calls of support and help. Friends offered to pick-up and drop-off our son at school. Home-cooked dinners arrived at our house. Balloons, stuffed animals, and cards arrived at the hospital room. Old friends from high school and college called her saying that they were there to listen if she wanted to vent or talk.

Her brief Facebook status update was all it took to activate her real-world support network. It was incredible.
“

The above post by Josh Kopelman got me thinking that in India, this would happen pretty naturally without a tweet and it would be appreciated but not seen as incredible.

As I was mulling this over my wife got off the phone with her mother and told me a funny story. She said that her mother, who had been living in the same apartment complex for 20 years, took a rickshaw to the neighborhood market.

As she settled in, the rickshawalla asked her why she had never taken a rickshaw before. He then went on to ask about her daughter (my wife), who he knew was in America, about her son and his kids and expressed how bad he had felt when my father-in-law had passed away. This rickshawalla had been outside this building for years and years and knew everything that was going on even though they had never ever interacted.

I wonder if Facebook and Twitter is the answer to the atomization of American society and is India headed towards such atomization to be glued together by social networks? Or is all this redundant in societies which have plenty of “rickshawalla”?

What do you folks think? Are the roles of social tools significantly different in different parts of the world?

Techgoss note:  Sunil Bhargava graduated from IIT and then went on to do an M.S in Management from Stanford University.  After a decade long career with blue chip companies like HP and Oracle, he moved to the world of start-ups as one of the founding team at Webvan.  The experience was invaluable as Webvan grew to a $4 Billion dollar company. Sunil then co-founded Business Signatures before it was acquired by Entrust.

These days he is a principal at www.tandementrepreneurs.com

Sunil had written this article for venture capital and start-up blog venturewoods.org.  Techgoss thanks him for allowing us to publish it.

Techgoss note:  Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

A number of Indian super bloggers like Kiruba Shankar and Compulsive Confessor use Twitter to communicate with the many people who follow their lives.