Website Offers Platform To Pay Tributes To The Departed Online
AHMEDABAD: A web portal, which offers an online platform to people to remember and pay tributes to their departed ones through digital obituaries, photographs, biographies and videos on a web page has been developed.
Human race has tried to remember those dead by building pyramids, memorials, samadhis and tombs like Taj Mahal besides through religious rituals and heart-wrenching quotations on grave stones. After the advent of newspapers, people started issuing condolence message adverts in memory of the dead.
In 2011, when food was served in one such newspaper page, full of condolence advertisements (common in Gujarati newspapers here), to two friends by a street hawker, they chanced upon the idea of providing an online platform to people to lock the memories of their loved ones permanently.
Thus, Vimal Popat and Vivek Vyas of Rajkot launched their first and only web portal of the country dedicated to obituaries for common people on net called Shrandhajali.com.
"Though newspapers reach lakhs of people on a single day, the shelf life of a newspaper is very limited and after that it is used for different purposes. We thought that this web-based portal will be an alternative to remember and pay tributes to those who we adore but have left this abode," Vivek Vyas said.
"There are names of greats and reputed contemporaries on the web, but when we search the name of our grandfather or father it is not there on the net. By this website you can create permanent digital footprints of your family which is required in this digital age," Vyas said.
Popat and Vyas, who were working in an international company, left their jobs to launch the service of Shrandhajali.com, which was given the certificate of the first online memorial website of the country early this year.
The website provides a platform to post biographies, videos, photos and obituaries of the deceased. It also allows you to have a family detail page. Anyone across the globe will be able to post condolence messages and pay tributes on that page to the departed soul.
"The web page can be created in seven languages comprising English and six Indian languages. We have kept the website advertisement free to maintain the sanity of the space," Vyas said.
"We have also decided to wave the nominal charges that we take to post a web page for the category of persons like martyred soldiers of Army, Navy and Air force, prominent people in politics, social work, film stars, spokespersons," Vyas said.
The website has uploaded around 300 remembrance web pages on their website so far. The website charges nominal fees of 
2,700 for uploading the web page, Vyas said.
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