Indians in Gated Communities Meet Their Neighbors Online
June 12th, 2012So it goes…
Via: Washington Post:
Sumit Jain has fond memories of his childhood in a small town where everybody knew everybody. But as a young man, he moved to a big city for work and began living in an apartment building. Jain said he soon missed feeling connected to a community.
That sense of loss led him to create Commonfloor.com, a “neighborhood portal” for Indians whose lifestyles have changed with this nation’s economic transformation but who still crave neighborhood life. A sort of hyper-local version of Facebook, Commonfloor creates online communities for the half a million users in 30,000 apartment buildings across 100 cities it has attracted so far.
“Something fundamental is changing among urban Indians today,” said Jain, 27, a software engineer and co-founder of the start-up in the southern city of Bangalore. “We no longer know who our next-door neighbor is, we don’t speak to each other in the elevators and we cannot knock on the neighbor’s door just to say hello without making them wary.”
As India’s economy modernizes, millions of young people are leaving their parents’ homes to find work, and many of them are moving into apartment complexes in the city. These fortress-like gated communities — with uniformed security guards and surveillance cameras — are designed to keep strangers out. But neighborly ties are rare as residents adjust to fast-paced lives, long commutes and access to an abundance of technology.
Burbclaves. Right on schedule.