We had so much personality once upon a time. People dressed like the exact combination of things they were obsessed with at that moment, and everyone looked different from each other, including the internet. Before social media platforms compressed everybody into the same profile layout, people had actual websites. Pages full of anime GIFs, poetry blogs written at 2 AM, Cricketers’ photo archives, song lyric pages, paranormal theories, wrestling forums, and diary entries hidden between glitter graphics and flame borders. GeoCities grew rapidly during this time because regular people could suddenly create their own corner of the internet for free, and millions did. At one point, it hosted more than 38 million pages and organised users into “neighbourhoods” based on interests, so sci-fi fans, movie nerds, gamers, artists, and music obsessives all ended up building their own strange little communities online. 

A lot of those websites looked objectively terrible. There was flashing text, terrible fonts, autoplay music, under-construction GIFs everywhere. But they had substance, because every page came from somebody’s actual taste, their sense of humour, their obsessions, their cringe phase, their emotional state that week. You could tell when somebody had spent six straight hours learning HTML just to make a homepage for their favourite band. Even now, people are trying to rebuild that feeling through platforms like Neocities, which openly positions itself as a revival of the old GeoCities era and encourages users to make websites “as normal or crazy as you want.” 

A surprising number of Indian celebrities had websites during this era too. Some looked like fan forums accidentally handed official access, some had handwritten welcome notes, and some genuinely felt like walking through a celebrity’s personal scrapbook from 2004. Here are some exceptional ones that are still around:

Simi Garewal’s website is both absurd and endearing. It’s filled with voice recordings of her speaking directly to visitors about different parts of her life and career. There are separate audio sections where she talks about love, heartbreak, marriage, loneliness, films, friendships, ageing, and relationships in a very long-form way. Then there’s an advice section where fans, to this day, write to her with questions about dating, family problems, insecurity, breakups, and life decisions, and she replies to them personally, like old magazine advice columns. The website also has archives dedicated to her talk show, 'Rendezvous With Simi Garewal', with behind-the-scenes stories, old interviews, photographs, production details, and reflections on guests she interviewed over the years.

Check it out here.

Shammi Kapoor was considered the first Indian internet user and digital evangelist. He famously set up his own website in the mid-1990s, which is still active today. The website is an enormous Kapoor family archive mapping their family tree across generations with individual pages dedicated to different family members, old photographs, film histories, anecdotes, and personal memories. Then, there are entire sections devoted to Shammi Kapoor himself — autobiographical writing, stories from film shoots, travel memories, spiritual experiences, old interviews, and long recollections of different moments in his life. One page has him talking in detail about accidents on film sets and injuries he got while shooting songs and action scenes. Another page is dedicated to his friendship with Afzal Sharif after Partition. There are tribute pages for people like Nargis, galleries filled with black-and-white images, and pages dedicated to Prithvi Theatre and the history of old Hindi cinema. A lot of the writing is in first person, so the entire site reads almost like Shammi Kapoor personally guiding visitors through stories about his family, films, friendships, and memories from decades of Hindi cinema. 

Check it out here.

Amitabh Bachchan’s Tumblr blog 'Bachchan Bol' is still active. It's like a running diary, with entries numbered day by day for thousands of posts straight. Most of them were written late at night from Jalsa after shoots, events, recordings, or meetings, and the posts move between personal reflections, poems, photographs, handwritten notes, updates from film sets, cricket commentary, health updates, memories of his parents, and long messages addressed to fans he calls his “Ef” or extended family. Some entries are just a few lines written at 2 AM, while others turn into massive streams of thought about work, ageing, pain, fame, music, loneliness, discipline, or the changing media landscape. There are also constant uploads of photographs from film sets, Sunday gatherings outside Jalsa, family events, and old archival images from his career.

Check it out here.

John Abraham’s website opens with separate sections like ‘Movies,’ ‘Fitness,’ ‘Wheels,’ ‘John’s Journal,’ and ‘My World,’ each functioning almost like its own archive. The ‘Wheels’ section is one of the biggest parts of the site and is completely dedicated to motorcycles, with photographs of his bike collection, riding images, racing-related content, and detailed pages around specific bikes. ‘John’s Journal’ functions like a blog, featuring personal entries, updates on shoots, fitness, travel, and film promotions. There’s also a visible fan interaction section where people leave birthday messages, questions, and long notes to him, and the website encourages visitors to write to him directly through forms and comment sections. Other parts of the website collect wallpapers, promotional photographs, film stills, media appearances, charity work, and image galleries from different periods of his career. 

Check it out here.

The funny thing is that making websites is technically easier now than it has ever been. Platforms like GoDaddy, Squarespace, Wix, and dozens of portfolio builders have removed almost all the technical obstacles from the process, and templates do most of the work for you. What’s lost in the process is originality. The idea of a personal brand has swallowed us all up under capitalism, adulterated by an image we’re trying to sell. Even artists have had to fall in line to appeal to galleries, curators and the ‘right eyes’ to put themselves and their work out there. It’s all corporatized and delegated to management, which I assume many submitted to unenthusiastically because the rules of creative economy have changed and it's just what you got to do to survive. As the fatigue sets in and our starvation for 'real' grows, these Y2K-era websites remain a bitter-sweet artefact of times where we expressed and indulged in ourselves purely for the love of the game. 

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