Mom in Delhi needs a hand? E-mail yourmaninindia.com

So, you're an Indian living in the United States, making megabucks in Redwood City, Calif. A big shot.

But your aging parents are back home in India, alone. What should you, as a good Indian son or daughter, do? Call or send an e-mail to yourmaninindia.com, who will do everything from paying the family bills to just sitting down and being your mom or dad's new best friend.

It's an example of the ongoing nuclearization of the Indian family, and it's the latest trend for the thoroughly modern, upwardly mobile expatriate Indian.

"These days, people don't want distant relatives to get involved. So you get a professional service to do it, and that's where we come in," says P. Sunder, chief operating officer of yourmaninindia.com, in Bombay (Mumbai).

Five or 10 years ago, a company like yourmaninindia might not have worked. Many Indians abroad would have still preferred to travel to India to complete jobs themselves, or relied on relatives to get odd jobs done. But now, many young expatriate Indians - often several in the same family - are moving abroad and deciding to stay there permanently, adding long-distance complications to family relationships that only work when members are physically close.

"It's a real dilemma," says Dipankar Gupta, a sociologist at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. "People have to be equally committed both to the traditional commitments to family and to their individual futures in a more modern society."

The tug of commitments are felt most during emergencies, when a relative back home is sent to a hospital, says Mr. Gupta.

"When times get bad, if a cousin gets sick, the whole family is needed," Gupta says. "Doctors don't take care of the patient completely. Families have to stay there in the room to keep an eye on the doctor, because he tends to disappear."

For Indians living abroad, "you have to have a surrogate," says Gupta. "It's almost like you've outsourced your responsibilities."

After just four months of full time operation, yourmaninindia.com receives 70 to 80 inquiries each day. Ask P. Sunder what services he provides, and he'll answer, "anything." The company's motto is "ho jaayega," (it will happen).

In the company office in downtown Bombay, Mr. Sunder runs through a list of current requests:

• A man in Australia asks for help finding a puppy for his young daughter living in the Punjab. He lists the preferred breeds in order of priority: 1. Pug. 2. Lhasa Apso. 3. Cocker Spaniel. 4. Norwich Terrier.

• One Indian student in the US wants a birth certificate from his home village in Tamil Nadu so that he can apply for a work permit. The fee is $20. If the student had flown home to do it himself, the airfare alone would cost about $1,000.

• One man in New Jersey, who starts his e-mail by writing "It's a little complicated," says that he needs to locate a child in the south Indian city of Chennai in order to disperse money from the estate of a deceased relative. The child appears tied to an extramarital affair; family members in a case where family honor or personal gain is involved could not be trusted find the child themselves.

Fees for these services range from $25 to obtain a birth certificate in a large city ($40 for a distant village); $150 to manage an apartment, and take rent from a tenant; and $400 for parental care, including escort to weekly medical checkups.

Yourmaninindia.com only has 25 employees of its own, but it joined up recently with theTTK Corporation, which makes, among other things, pressure cookers and condoms. With its network of thousands of TTK dealers, yourmaninindia.com is able to reach into almost every town and village in India. Not only do they get the job done, they tend to do it much more quickly than the average Indian could do it himself.

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