Rediff believed it ran India's first online bookshop, music shop and gift shop. In June 2000 only a sliver of Indians had internet access, often in cyber cafes, but millions more lived abroad and wanted news from home. Rediff.com, from Mumbai, gave them news, cricket scores, an instant messenger in English and Hindi, and free email with over 650,000 registered users. It went to Nasdaq just as the dot-com bubble began to burst.

A Mumbai Portal for the World

Rediff was incorporated in Mumbai in January 1996 as Rediff Communication, with Ajit Balakrishnan as chairman and managing director. It became a public limited company in 1998 and renamed itself Rediff.com India in February 2000. The portal mixed news, chat, email and shopping. It also linked Indian software engineers to jobs overseas through a recruiting site. The plan was to earn from advertising and e-commerce as Indians came online.

Twelve Dollars and a Long Fade

Rediff sold 4.6 million American depositary shares at $12 each in June 2000, raising $55.2 million, and listed on Nasdaq as REDF. The dot-com crash followed within months, and online ads in India grew slower than hoped. Rediff kept running its portal and email service as Google, Yahoo and Facebook pulled Indian users away. In May 2016 the company took its shares off Nasdaq and ended its US registration.

Cover: Krishna Fluting for the Gopis, Unknown (India). Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for Krishna gathering a crowd with his flute (a portal that draws people in).