Thursday, December 24, 2020

Before Bhumi - How I met my co-founder

Social media is a lot of different things to different people, but that's how I met my co-founder :)

Read on…

For quite some time early in 2006 or late 2005 I started seeing posts on Orkut about a social group. Orkut had this feature where users could posts scraps (like a Facebook post) on other people's wall and I kept seeing these posts often. The posts were from members of a group called Bharat uday Mission (BM) & requested people to join the movement with messages like 'rise of a great nation', 'second freedom struggle' etc. I was intrigued and joined the Orkut group. The group in Chennai seemed to be meeting every month and I missed one or two before walking into one sometime around March 2006.

It was a Sunday afternoon, the meeting was at the stadium inside IIT Madras, I remember parking my scooter and walking inside. Someone parked the bike at the same time and we walked in together greeting each other. That was the first time I met  it was his first meeting too. Hari was still doing in his final year of Engineering.

We learnt about BM how it had been started by an IITian and had several chapters across India and the world. The group had a lot of young people, dissatisfied with the current system and wanting to make a change. This is when I first met  Surendran Balachandran who seemed to be coordinating the Chennai chapter. 

Orkut doesn't exist anymore, what did you consider important 15 years ago that doesn't exist anymore? Leave a comment


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