Welcome to the mother’s den

Whoever thought Google throws an answer, apart from a 20-page search result, to everything! When 29-year old Akansha Bansal was looking for a very simple remedy for a few months-old colicky nephew of hers, nothing relevant came up.

“Of course, all the websites exist, but they are typically talking of mothers down South and their experiences, whereas we are climatically and culturally very different,” she talks of the incident that first propelled the website buddingstar.com, a platform exclusively bringing together mothers from North India and especially the tricity.

Co-founded by her brother Anshul Bansal, a couple of years later the website grows into a platform for all mothers to connect. Laughs Akansha, “Frankly, all the mothers today would rather trust search engines than the elders in the family who brought up kids under very different circumstances and in another era.”

In no time, the moms connected. That snowballed into something much bigger and more meaningful. “Currently, apart from the 48,000 people on the page, we have over a hundred paid bloggers contributing and also several budding bloggers. In Chandigarh, several food and fashion bloggers existed but no new mommy bloggers,” shares the management pass out from Panjab University.

As for the related Facebook page Parenting Mom Style, that’s a 33,000 strong community, with mostly new mothers from Chandigarh. A platform that she doesn’t plan on commercialising but would still like it to be commercially viable for all the bloggers who are on board.

“We’ve also bought 15 professionals on board, like nutritionist, dieticians and gynecologists who give customised counseling, diet charts as the need may be.”

Talk of a few major concerns that new mothers have and she is quick about that one. “Apart from the pressure to quickly shed post pregnancy weight, breastfeeding and post- partum depression are major concerns of young mothers.”—Manpriya Singh