Bishakha,

Just to point out, our community was going super strong in the first half of 2009, before our first meetup at Tinu Cherian's house in July 2009. We were colaborating, discussing and working together, on Wikipedia itself. Without the mailing list, knowing each other, offline, on Facebook or Twitter ...
Ask anyone in the Banglore community, purely by using Users talk pages we got several GA and FA level articles. Gdibyendu, SBC-YPR, me and Logicwiki got Transport in India elevated to GA, without knowing each other offline.