What do you do when your business is in a cyclical downswing? If you are Ader Gandi, you start a website. The mortgage broker from San Francisco has been enjoying himself finding news about Parsis and Zoroastrians and pasting it on his website, www.theparsichronicle.com, since the beginning of December 2003. By March 7, 2005 the site had attracted 28,000 hits and a variety of compliments. Spending eight hours a day on the computer, including his professional work, the website is a "happy obsession...keeping track of Parsi achievements” because he "wants to see the community standing out there, doing something.” He feels he is "bridging the community” for people don’t always know what is happening, despite the fact that the electronic media exists.
Gandi: news on the web
With nearly 500 articles listed over 50 pages on his site Gandi writes, "My idea behind The Parsi Chronicle is simple: keep a chronicle of Parsi Zoroastrians mentioned in the news, consider it a living history of our community.” Updating it several times a week, he considers himself a "mechanism for uniting people world wide.” He says he has a "de facto list of experts” whom he sources and nets an average two enquiries a week from all over the world, many, nay most, of them from non-Zarathushtis. He is happy that the site has advanced in ranking. "The success is more phenomenal than I expected,” he notes, though it cannot measure up to the popularity of the matrimonial websites which he says are the most popular with all communities.
What prompted him to undertake this activity in particular? we wonder. "The fact that it was feasible; that I could do it with relative ease,” he replies casually, adding that there is an unsatiated appetite for these subjects, prompting nearly 100 unique people visit it every day. But he is aware that there are "holes in the data gathering; I don’t know enough about it. But because I am a Parsi Zoroastrian and because I believe there are niche interests left in the world — ours is an inbuilt niche — therefore I have no intention to change the focus or mechanism” of the website. He adds that he finds the news even before the newspapers are printed.
Gandi helps us distinguish between the different technologies employed by his site as versus the creatingawareness site: The latter uses the "push technology,” delivering news items in your mailbox; The Parsi Chronicle uses the "pull technology” like a billboard one inspects. Short synopsis of the various stories he encounters on the Net are pasted for inspection. If the précis tickles your fancy, you click on it to go into the whole story on the original site. The information is predominantly of Indian origin.
Two new additions include www. theparsigara.com and www.the parsi directory.com. Gandi and his business partner Sam N. J. Maneckshaw began the gara website in the fall of 2004. Their intention is to buy and sell high quality Parsi garas, borders and such over the Net. You can see the picture and descriptions or you can see, touch and feel the current collection of borders at Maneckshaw’s store. On view are 16 specimens of traditional borders. The directory, which has new listings of world wide Parsi Zoroastrians almost daily, is a joint effort with Yazdi Tantra of the World Zoroastrian Chamber of Commerce. They can be contacted on email: Ader@ Gandi.com and agandi@aol.com and Tantra on yazdi@on-lyne.com
Gandi was born and grew up in Karachi where his father Behram worked in the US consulate. In those days the US gifted a retiring employee with a green card and so, when Ader was 18 the family, including mother Gulmohar and brother Jamshed, migrated to California in 1975. Ader acquired his bachelor of science and bachelor of business administration degrees from the San Francisco State University. Jamshed is a partner in a tax accounting firm in California, notes Ader.
Enjoying the cultural aspects of being Parsi, Gandi has been visiting Bombay frequently over the past year, making a lot of friends at his favorite watering hole, The Willingdon Sports Club. That is where he lunches, swims, learns to play tennis and introduces us to theparsichronicle.com on his state of the art laptop. Some stories are meant to be seen. We agree.