Of all the holy places I have visited, and trust me, the believer in me has been at many places, right from Hindu temples to Muslim mosques to churches to Buddhist pagodas to Jain Upashrayas, the peace and calmness I experience @ Ma Niketan is equal to the one I experience @ these holy places.

The first visit of Ma Niketan is always a reality check for people. At least it was for me – in a strange way. After meeting the girls, right from age 4 to 22, and hearing their stories, I suddenly felt privileged beyond words.

After facing so much at such a young age, these girls have probably weathered it all – and still have emerged out stronger and smiling out of this ritual. No doubt, the credit of all this goes to a very large extent to the sister’s @ Ma Niketan but the spirit of endurance and survival these girls display is extra ordinary.

The sisters, lead by Sister Barbara, have their task cut out. They want to create strong individuals out of each and every girl that comes to Ma Niketan, so that when they leave the shelter, they are ready to take on the challenges that life has a habit of throwing up.

Maybe that is the reason; Ma Niketan does not have a school of its own. The girls are sent to schools in the locality and the default learning medium is English unless they have an academic background in Marathi (the regional language). This makes the girl interact with the outside world in a controlled environment and to a large extent prepares them for it.

Also, the extra curricular activities undertaken at Ma Niketan, right from computer classes to yoga, kathak (traditional Indian dance form) to Tai chi, personality development to science awareness classes, Time Management to Behavior Patterns – these girls are prepared in every way. All these are voluntary activities, done by individuals and organizations who strive for the development of the girl child.

The accommodation and food is adequate. After all, feeding, housing and educating 350+ girls are no mean task. Ma Niketan runs on donations made by individuals and corporates alike. If you go there and sit in the reception on some evening, you might see locals from neighboring low-cost housing colonies coming in and offering fruits and old toys to someone stepping out from a luxury car and writing down a cheque and meeting the kids.

There have been many success stories out of Ma Niketan. Right from air hostesses to nurses to teachers to secretaries to fashion designers to hotel management graduates – these girls have graduated out to the world and are leading a life of their own. The shelter finds the right grooms and many are married into families.

I still remember at one of the lunches @ Ma Niketan, I came across a lady who had grown up @ Ma Niketan. She was accompanied by her husband and the happiness on her face said it all!

The fact remains, that Ma Niketan is an institution in itself. Girl child is most vulnerable on streets and here’s a bunch of saintly ladies bringing them under their roof and making independent individuals out of them – giving them a chance at life !!!

My friend Sunil and myself had personally started our tryst with Ma Niketan some 18 months back by teaching computers to girls. However, the time investment that we used to do @ Ma Niketan took a back seat due to the usual excuses of work pressures, domestic and international trips and other social pressures.

Despite everything, Ma Niketan had always been in our thoughts and the well being of the girl child is always @ our hearts. We have adopted Ma Niketan as our personal and organizational cause and shall strive for better visibility of Ma Niketan and bring it to corporates and individuals who would like to support the cause of girl child.

For further information please visit the Ma Niketan website at http://www.ma-niketan.com or call on + 91 22 2534 17 73 or + 91 22 2536 69 49 and ask for Sister Barbara.

If you have any ideas of how you would like to team up with us please email me @ vishaal.shah@phicreativity.com

It’s one thing to design and develop a great website and have it online. After all, it is something that is going to be the entry point for your company, your brand and your services.

It’s another thing to promote it. Promote it against and amongst the tens or hundreds or thousands of websites offering similar services. Appear, maybe not on top always, but at least @ the right time @ the right place when the visitor is either searching for you or your services.

However, what about the million other websites that your site could probably land into or get indexed into?

Be it search sites to comparison websites to complaint websites to consumer forums to blogs. These could be happy customers to disgruntled employees to game playing competitors.

However, it’s imperative that whatever is written about your company or brand in the online space is right and correct.

There’s no way you could curb someone’s right to write and it is totally impossible to do so on a free medium like internet, however, countering it with the right statements and strategies is important.

Let’s take an example of an independent product evaluation portal. People come online, post their comments and put in their thoughts about your product. Some post good and some shall write negative – based on their experience, not only of the product but also after sales service, installations, repairs, call centre, etc.

Now, the power of these portals is that they get indexed in the search engines on a regular basis and hence, the comments posted in these portals also get indexed @ the top of search listings.

The end result being that when someone searches for you, they end up on pages which are offering negative comments about you.

Now, that’s not really where you want your visitor to land up. Do you?!?!?

There are strategies and techniques which could be implemented so that only pages with mostly good things and comments about your products appear in the top positions in the search engines.

These strategies are totally ethical in nature. Just like it is a standard practice to issue a press release after a negative incident, similarly these activities simply respond to the negative comments posted by people and create a positive press about you (well its not that simple – just simplifying it for your sake)

Now, should you only do it when there’s too much of wrong about you in the online space?

Well, as an online brand management consultant, I would recommend you to do it on a monthly basis. More good press about you, more difficult it becomes for negative comments to come on top.

The entire Online Brand Management exercise is akin to gardening. You tend to your flower beds (website) on a regular basis and the chances of weeds growing or showing up are less.

We are performing Online Brand Management for various websites. Right from corporate companies to personal websites. Call us for a free consultation on how we could manage the online brand for you or email us @ India@phicreativity.com

Optimystix has solid track record in Advertising Films, Game Shows, Light Entertainment Shows, Bollywood Programming, Children Programs & Fiction Programming.

Being enthused by the web solution provided to one of their brainchild brands “Mainduck” (mobile content provider on http://www.mainduck.com), the czars of India’s entertainment industry gave us a job to revamp their existing corporate website.

With the offering of the company spanning across diverse media and genres, the challenge was to display the diversity of the companies offering from home page onwards. Creating visualization in 2D animation using Flash, the major USP’s of the company were portrayed!!

Have a look and decide for yourself @ http://www.optimystix.tv whether it works or not.