According to recent estimates, there are about 25 million non resident Indian ethnic people around the globe.
The British brought Indians around the globe with them as indentured servants to countries such as Australia, Malaysia, South Africa.
They were even brought as servants to Latin America and the Caribbean.
There are many Indians in Trinidad and Tobago and they are the second most common ethnic community in Jamaica behind Africans.
Currently, the rich gulf states have employed many Indians in countries such as UAE and Saudi Arabia to work as construction workers.
The United States and the UK employ them as computer professionals.
The large Indian community worldwide will still have a large Indian family back in the motherland.
They keep in touch via email, phone, and SMS.
Email services are free but can only be directed to those in India that have internet connections.
Despite the fact that it is 2009, a large number of Indians are still without Internet access and those that do only have a few moments to go to an internet cafe.
Phone services can be quite costly and with the time differences is not always practical.
There are ways to make free phone calls when both individuals are online and speak through MSN or Yahoo.
With SMS, one cannot write as much as in an email nor is it as personal as phone service.
The advantages to it is that it is convenient and more readily available to Indians as anything else.
If one sends an SMS message using your cell phone delivery service, it would cost 20 cents.
With Skype, it would cost 15 cents.
But there are now reliable websites on the net that provide free SMS services to anybody in India.