Issue Date: November 1-15, 2007, Posted On: 11/9/2007
Web site to help Indian women meet others
By KARA BECKER

There is a new networking Web site for the rapidly growing demographic of Indian women living in the United States and around the world.
Indusladies.com provides information on topics such as where to find the best hair care or how to cook certain Indian dishes — or just to talking about the difficulty of raising children of the second generation.
The site was launched two years ago by Malathy Jey. Jey got married and moved to the United States in 2004 after working at the Ford Motor Company in India for six years. She began Indusladies.com a few months after she moved. She currently lives in Austin, Texas with her husband and fifteen month-old daughter Kavya.
When Jey first moved, she wondered if others from her home country felt as disconnected as she did.
“With so many Indians already in the United States, I thought that I would feel at home here,” Jey said in a press release. “However, the lack of people density, the eerie silence in U.S. neighborhoods and the inability to meet friends and relatives in person made me feel rudderless. While American neighbors are good, I felt myself reaching out to Indian lady friends to share my life. That’s when the light bulb went on! If there is an online community for Indian ladies living in different parts of the world, wouldn’t it be a great place for all of us to hang out, share things and make friendships?”
The global online community of Indian women is free and purely self-funded by the administrator. The site currently has 11,300 members, according to Geetha Sadish, the public relations manager of Indusladies.com. Sadish hopes the Web site’s membership will eventually reach 100,000. Indusladies.com is also looking at possibly including more ads that would directly apply to Indian women.
Pravina Ghaghada, a member who lives in the United Kingdom, praised the networking site.
“As we all aspire to build new lives abroad, we miss our culture and the social side of our communities... With the Indusladies.com website, I find that ladies can share their thoughts from simple things to more complex issues. I have come across so many young ladies who find solace in pouring their hearts out from issues concerning difficult spouses, in-laws, anxiety about settling into new countries, cooking, health issues etc. The mature way in which the senior ladies have responded is excellent and they have really created an open and honest forum that Indian ladies can draw upon as an invaluable source of advice and information,” she said in an e-mail.
Some members say IndusLadies.com has also helped them make new friends.
“We are all attached to each other,” said Shanthi Vyas from Chennai. “We are happy when somebody has a baby. We are all sad when somebody is in a problem or has lost somebody. There are miracles happening from the power of joint prayers from the kind hearted souls of Indus ladies. I have made friends, beyond frontiers. It has helped me to widen my horizon.”