-- FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE --

September 30, 2000

Millions of hits per month. Daily messages of adoration. A well-known brand name serving a market of over 100 million customers. Even an international cookbook deal with HarperCollins publishers.

But Amma -- a generic pseudonym which means "mother" in South Asia -- exhibits none of the characteristics so often displayed by today's average dot-communist. Indeed, the founder of Ammas.com, one of the largest South Asian sites on the Internet, isn't even young. She's a grandmother, a housewife for over 35 years, and she firmly believes that a woman's place is squarely in the kitchen.

A kitchen, that is, with computers.

"Many Westerners see the Internet as this vast, omniscient repository of information," explains Lakshmi Krishnan, Content Manager of Ammas.com and official spokesperson for Amma. "In fact, the information available on the Internet is quite limited, focusing mainly on entertainment. For most South Asians, the real source of information -- information that really matters in our daily lives -- exists in the minds of our elders. Ammas.com is about making that knowledge available to those South Asians who otherwise wouldn't have access to it."

The main reason South Asians lose touch with such information is because they move away from it. About 21 million South Asians (which includes India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Nepal and Bhutan) live outside of their home countries -- in North America, Australasia, the U.K. and the Middle East.

The vast majority have migrated for employment reasons, to countries where the jobs are more plentiful and the currencies more valuable. In the quest for success, they leave behind some of their closest relatives.

Yet about 40% of these people are linked to the Internet. And Ammas.com, with its vast respository of motherly advice, offers a place for dislocated South Asians to access a collection of "Ammas" -- which Ammas.com defines as people with expertise in such areas as cooking, marriage, South Asian fashion and home remedies.

The site started in 1996, out of New Delhi, as a simple recipe page featuring the authentic recipes of "Amma," who prefers to remain anonymous (though a rough sketch of her background is available on the website). Since then the site has grown rapidly and boasts the largest South Asian spice database on the Internet, a complete US Department of Health nutritional database, a collection of over 36,000 recipes, and the Internet's largest collection of South asian lifestyle advice. In terms of information technologically, the site even competes with some of the largest American-based Internet ventures, containing more cooking tips, for example, than a site like Cooking.com.

But perhaps its most unique feature is a system called Ask Amma(tm). Here "Ammas" from around the world sign up and receive their own web page, through which they can enter recipes, answer user queries, write newsletters to their users -- and basically play the role of "Amma."

The Ammas are ranked according to a point system which tallies their registered users, recipe dowloads, answers to queries and more. All responses to queries must pass through a "Council of Ammas," which is comprised of the highest ranking Ammas. Today Ammas.com has over 900 "Ammas" on its system, with 3-5 new Ammas joining the network each day.

"It's a kind of quality control," says Krishnan, "the idea being that Amma may know best, but that the collective Amma, the increasing network of Ammas, knows even better. This way you can get multiple responses to your query, each one sifted through a ranked system of motherhood. One thousand maternal brains working together to help you with day-to-day living -- be it explaining how to cook your favorite food or how to find the right spouse."

But most users will tell you that it took just one brain -- the original Amma's brain -- to make the site such a success. Last month Amma signed a book deal with HarperCollins for a cookbook which will "both offer Amma's wonderful recipes and tell her unique story," according to the book's publicists.

Amma, however, doesn't consider her story so unique. She comes from a remote village in the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, married at sixteen -- before completing secondary school -- and raised a family. She believes in a simple life, with simple ambitions. She only published the recipes on the web for her children, who had moved to America to study. The site's popularity came as a complete surprise to her.

"She still can't believe that so many people are attracted to the sorts of things that were just an everyday part of her life," says Krishnan. And even if there is a single Amma responsible for the site's success, Amma points to a different mother -- her mother.

"My mother was the strongest person I've ever known," Amma explains on the site's home page, where a rough drawing of her mother -- and the words "to Amma's Amma" -- preside over all the site's content. "She showed me that strength is about character, and that no other occupation in the world demands as much strength, wisdom, courage, discipline and the qualities of leadership as motherhood. Except, perhaps, grand-motherhood."

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For more information, please visit http://www.ammas.com, or email info@ammas.com.