When Bangalore-based winemaker Yashoda Devi arrived in France some months ago, her vintner peers did not know what to expect. Was she an artist also, they asked her? Was she a Krishna devotee? Was she an author? Devi was none of these, not by a long shot.

It didn’t take long for Devi to find out that their puzzlement arose solely out of searching for ‘Yashoda Devi’ on Google. That night she Googled her own name and came up with 35,000 results. “The search came up with many namesakes — one was from a mental hospital, another had taken her husband to court,” she described in shock, “and there were hundreds of pages about a Madhubani artist and thousands dedicated to Krishna’s mother Yashoda”.

Some forty result pages later, Devi finally found a reference to herself. She was mentioned in the passing as an attendee at a Bangalore Page Three event. There was no mention of her winemaking career at one of India’s leading vineyards, Grover, or her being the first Indian to be on a judging panel at an international winemaking event. There was no mention of her work as a practicing pediatrician. There was no talk of her antics as a crazed fan of Doors singer Jim Morrison at his grave at Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Like millions of Indians born and bred in the pre-Internet era, Devi was paying the price of being oblivious to Google and blogs, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. And LinkedIn. “LinkedIn? What’s that?” she asks. By accident or by choice, Devi has preferred to shake hands, hand out cards and make friends in the real world.

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