While mandarins of Uncle Sam's tough new regime are making half-witted attempts to isolate New Delhi with punitive measures against Indian scientists following the nuclear flap, Indian digerati are scaling dazzling new heights in America's Silicon Valley.

Take for instance the Junglee story.

If last year's acquisition of Sameer Bhatia's Hotmail by Microsoft was the big story among the desi cyberati, here's the 1998 piece de resistance: Four IIT-ians who founded and ran Junglee Corp, one of the cyberworld's hottest new properties and a pioneer in electronic commerce, have just merged with Amazon.com for a handsome $180 million.

Did someone say sanctions?

If events in the cyberworld of the 1990s resemble the gold rush of the early 19th century, then consider Indians to be the new frontiersmen. And nothing tells the story better than the spectacular tale of Junglee, founded only two years ago, which has made four young Indians millionaires overnight.

SaysAnand Rajaraman, at 26 the youngest of the quartet, "These are exciting times and like many Indians, we're there up front."

Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan, the original co-founders of Junglee, were indeed ahead of the pack when they conceived their online shopping program while doing their doctorate at Stanford.

On the Internet, electronic shopping was just gathering speed. But it was a virtual jungle out there with a myriad companies selling a gazillion products on their own websites. And it was growing chaotic by the hour.

What Junglee did was create a single window marketplace on the Web by making every item from every supplier available for purchase, thereby saving consumers and enterprises time and money. Web shoppers could locate, compare and transact millions of products from across the Internet shopping mall through one window.

(The name Junglee itself, thought of by the foursome in a moment of jest, is entirely apt for those who are familiar with the Internet, a virtual jungle).

SoonJunglee was employing more than 500 personnel, 80 merchants and 40 portals to deliver more than 15 million items on its Junglee Shopping Guide. The service was also extended to job listing and classifieds (imagine seeing all the classified jobs in India on one website; or being able to buy a used car by scouring ads from all sources at a single web sites, and moreover being able to zero in on a car by year of model, price range, colour etc).

In fact, one of the venture's early backers was the Washington Post Online company, which readily recognised the enormous potential of Junglee's engines and owns 12 per cent of the company.

Using the technology marketed as Junglee Canopy product family, Post created its CareerPost job classified section, listing jobs from over 50 sources, and allowing visitors to search the sites by job category, company, locations and many other attributes and key words.

Says Rakesh Mathur, Junglee's Chairman and CEO who gave vision to the enterprise of Rajaraman andHarinarayan: "It was one-stop shopping at its best. We were on our way to being the top retailers on the Internet. Actually top retailers. Period."

So why sell out to Amazon.com? For one, say the Junglee boys, the two companies complemented each other. Amazon.com was already the largest retail merchants on the Internet, while Junglee's forte was its brand name and technological savvy.

Says Venky Harinarayan: "The vision thing was more important. We thought that the sum was greater than the parts. One plus one equalled more than two."

Of course, the $180 million helped too.

On a whole other level, success stories like Hotmail and Junglee make nonsense of the economic and scientific sanctions the US is trying to impose on India. Even as they were busy expelling Indian scientists last month, the US executive and legislature was busy trying to up the number of visas given to foreign professionals under the H1-B category from 65,000 to 85,000. Nearly 40 per cent of those visas are expected to be given tocomputer professionals from India.

The Junglee four are all products of this supply chain. Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan, both from IIT Madras, came to Stanford and UCLA respectively, and have dazzled the infotech world with their innovative genius. Ashish Gupta is from IIT Kanpur, and Rakesh Mathur, who founded two other Silicon Valley companies (Qixel and Sona Computers) is from IIT Mumbai.

A quartet from the new Information Raj.