Why the Western Invasion?

I was going through Indianroomates.in, a website quite similar to its American counterpart Roomates.com which aims to help and connect (mostly) the youth seeking accommodation. One thing that really caught my attention was the picture of Indian youth on the homepage. As bizarre as it may sound, when was the last time you saw a non-NGO Indian website which had Indian faces? At the most it might have the token Indian or Black person to show diversity, but I think it’s quite rare to find only Indian people. In the beginning I felt maybe such a strategy is employed to show that that company is global (or at least aspiring to be global) but now it just seems like everyone is following the crowd. But then what about those companies which are purely based in India and don’t seem to be expanding outside India in the likely future. I say this because couple of the web based start ups that launched from my college and had noting to do with foreign clients had picture of Caucasian women playing with their Caucasian kids. It just doesn’t make sense. Why should a premier IIT-JEE (Not too tough to guess which one now) coaching institute which receives over a crore hits every year need to put a header picture of some American university students on its website? I don’t know where the problem lies. Is it that the companies ask the web designing team to put in those pictures (in case the work is being outsourced) or the company itself feels its needs such a picture. The whole point being that if your pictures don’t gel with your venture, you end up looking really stupid.

By the way it was really disappointing to see that the moment I clicked on a page at Indianroomates, it took me to another page. And this one had phirangs on it, smiling.

Here’s one solution. The issue of portraying yourself as something doesn’t need faces. It can be done through symbols as well. If you’re ashamed of putting in Indian people shaking hands (though I don’t know why that would be the case), then might as well show only the shaking of hands on your webpage rather than show a Chinese and a Kenyan doing so, especially if you’re a start up based in a small town whose main market is the nearby city.

Cross posted on WATBlog and Desicritics

Craigslist for BITS

Buysell, it's the BITSian version of Craigslist. Well sort of anyways. It's been high time an online system was made to sell stuff. The site started couple of days ago and since then has gathered quite a following. They have as an "introductory offer" revoked all membership fees for the time being( thank you very much). You can trade cycles, books, computer accessories , actually just about anything.

The site also is pretty uncluttered and has a clean look(unlike craigslist :P).


P.S:Though the fact that the site is hosted by one Cube Inc does raise suspicion among regular junta(atleast those who are familiar with who Cube is, or is it Qube?)

Also I'd personally advice these guys to change the name of the site to something else for there exists another Buysell.com, based in NewZealand. But since the BITSian site seems to be hosted on a local server, it shouldn't matter.