From dak at sarai.net Mon Dec 2 22:44:36 2002 From: dak at sarai.net (dak at sarai.net) Date: Mon, 02 Dec 2002 17:14:36 GMT Subject: [Sarai Newsletter] Sarai/CSDS Independent Fellowship Message-ID: <20021202.17143600@saumya.sarai.kit> Sarai/CSDS Independent Fellowship (December 2002-May 2003) We are happy to announce the list of Sarai/CSDS Short Term Independent Fellowships for the year 2002-03. We received more than one hundred and fifty proposals in English and Hindi from all over India, in response to the call for proposals that went out in September 2002. We were delighted by the number of high quality proposals that came in response to our advertisement. Sixty seven proposals were shortlisted and thirty six proposals were finally selected for support. Given the large number of good proposals and our desire to encourage younger scholars and practitioners we have decided to maximize the awardees by distributing the total grant outlay amongst a larger number of candidates. This has resulted in the awarding of some partial grants, which we hope will encourage an interesting and diverse body of research and practice. We congratulate all the awardees and thank all those who responded so enthusiastically to the call for proposals. The awardees (in alphabetical order) are - 1) Abhay Dube (Hindi) 'Naya' Shahar/Nayi Sexuality ('New' City/ New Sexuality) To focus on sexual assertitions in city/towns in the face of moral and organisational opposition. Print publications, video parlours and their subscribers as well as love spots in the city will form the basis of the study. It will also interrogate sex as commodity and how it has acquired a middle class respectability, and critique, in the form of court cases, organisational oppositions, etc.   2) A.R.Basu Mediation of a Marginal Science in a Colonial City: Reading Psychiatry in Colonial Bengali Periodicals To look at how psychiatry and categories such as insanity were deployed in Bengali periodicals, both popular and scientific, in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. 3) Arvind Narrain, C.S. Balachandran and Vinay Chandran Outing Bangalore : Intesections of Geographies, Law and Sexualites To embrace an ethnography of what it is to be homosexual in urban space, reflect on online homosexual spaces, construct everyday psycho-geographies of being gay and also look at the legal regimes and repressions that mark out the everyday experience of homosexuals in city spaces, specifically Bangalore. 4) Avinash Kumar (Hindi) Des-Pardes ka Dvand aur Dilli (The Dilemma of the Insider/Outsider and Delhi) To explore the writerly dilemma of belonging and alienation in a city of migrants, a city where the Hindi/Urdu dichotomy has greatly affected the writer. An entire range of  poetry and fiction will be looked at along with interviews conducted with all surviving writers to explore how their work reflects the everyday contradiction of living in a city they do not love. 5) Ayisha Abraham Deteriorating Memories: Blurring Fact and Fiction in Home Movies in India: Research, combined with work towards a media art project based on 8mm Home Movies in Bangalore. This project combines old and new media in very interesting ways. She has been collecting and researching the little known area of the domestic usage of 8mm, super 8 mm and 16 mm celluloid film, and has found remarkable collections, including those made by middle class housewives, a post office worker and other people who worked with these film formats as a hobby. She intends to work further with these materials, recycling them in a digital format and presenting them for an installation, or a series of installations, in spaces that are not mainstream art venues. She also intends to research and experiment with appropriate technological and aesthetic forms towards the public rendition of this material. 6) Bharti Chaturvedi The City of Bins : Narratives from the informal waste recycling sector in Delhi To work with personal narratives of people who work in the waste recycling sector in Delhi. This will work towards a wall newspaper with, and for, the waste recycling workers. 7) Bharti Kher Love -an absence of assignable cause: Research towards the realization of a media based art project To interrogate the delicate politics of status, gender and caste that lie at the heart of the three-line matrimonial ad. She will be researching into the appropriate digital interface with which to realize this project which will ultimately take the form of a video and sound installation. 8) Frederick Noronha GNU/Linux in India: Research and Reportage on the Free Software/Open Source Movement in India. Continuing last year's efforts at networking all the Linux Users Groups (LUGs) and other campaign groups across South Asia, Noronha also hopes to focus the research on Indic Computing and complete a book on FLOSS. 9) Gayatri Chatterjee Researching the Mehboob Papers To research a previously unexplored body of archival material, preserved in fourteen steel cupboards at the Mehboob studios in Mumbai. This will help to throw light on the story of the early years of Hindi cinema including foreign distribution, government decisions and policies regarding foreign quota, ways of amassing finance from various official and unofficial sources and the various situations filmmakers in India faced in the decades after independence. The papers will also allow for the tracing of the history of a great studio. 10) Hari Roka The Condition of Nepali Migrants in Delhi To work out a detailed ethnography of Nepali migrant workers in Delhi. It seeks to examine their everyday lives, their social networks and cultural practices in the city, the kind of films they see, their forms of political involvement (especially against the context of the insurgency in Nepal) and the way they see Delhi and other people in Delhi. 11) Khadeeja Arif and Ambareen Al Qadar Lives of Women in Zakir Nagar, Delhi. To interrogate issues of clothing, gestures, habitation, entertainment, physical movement and the very texture of the daily lived experiences of the women as something that is intrinsically linked to the peculiar formation of Zakir Nagar, Okhla, Delhi.” 12) Kundan Kaushav Upanyason Ka Shahar: The World of Hindi Popular Fictions, its Economy & its Images To examine the world of pulp literature in Hindi, especially centred around Meerut and Delhi, as sites of production. It wants to look at the network which is created around the production and distribution of the 'pulp novel' - small printing set ups and stalls on footpaths and railway stations, as well as examine the world views of both readers and writers through interviews, and collections of fan material. 13) Kurnal Rawat and Vishal Rawlley Typocity: Documentation and Interpretation of the Typographic forms in Public Signage in Mumbai To do a documentation and analysis of interesting and rare instances of typography throughout the city of Bombay from the point of view of graphic design, production techniques and social significance including painted film posters, hand painted restaurant menu boards, hand crafted shop signs and calligraphic taxi number plates. 14) Manju Singh (Hindi) Pregnancy Wards se kahaniya (Narratives from Pregnancy Wards in Delhi) To collect and illustrate narratives of pregnant women, their visitors and the workers in public and private hospitals in Delhi. 15) Meenu Gaur Camp People : The Refugees From Kashmir in Delhi To look at the way in which Kashmiri refugees have become part of the rhetorical arsenal of the Hindu right, even as their very real human needs and deprivations are completely neglected, and the violence that they have suffered is not addressed in any real sense. This project will be a documentation of the everyday lives, struggles and experiences of these refugees through recorded testimonies and photographs. It will also be an interrogation of the ambivalent and multiple meanings that the word 'home' conjures in the context of camp life, and the memories that the refugees have of the 'home' that they have left behind. 16) Nandini Chandra The Child's Experience of the City in Hindi Cinema To interrogate the narrative of the child in the city in Hindi Cinema, which is used as narrative justification for much that goes on in the course of a film. Interviews with famous child artists of the fifties and sixties, especially Daisy Irani and Master Raju, will help explore the performative trope of 'cuteness' that was mastered by them, and how they saw their own status as glorified child workers within the ambience of a bourgeoise cuteness that they had to affect. An interesting list of 33 films will form the basis of this study. 17) Narender Thakur Chowk : Study of the Daily Labour Market (Labour Chowk) in Delhi To document the world of the daily wage worker who sells, or attempts, to sell his labour in three sites of daily labour markets in North, East and South Delhi. A questionnaire, which encompasses a range of areas from communication networks within daily wage workers, to expenditure decisions, links with the village and many other specific inquiries, has been devised for detailed interviews. 18) Naresh Goswami (Hindi) Yamuna Paar ke Saptahik Bazaar: Paridhi par jeevan (The Weekly Markets of Trans-Yamuna: Life in the margins) To take a close look at the weekly haats (markets) that are held in different parts of the Trans-Yamuna area of Delhi on a particular day of the week. The network that is involved in the creation and dismantling of these  markets will be explored through a mix of text, sound, image and video by interacting with vendors, buyers and all those who involved. 19) Naunidhi Kaur Examination of everyday life in localities in Mumbai that were hit by the 1992-93 riots To explore how people in these locations view solidarity as well as tensions of everyday existence in the family and neighbourhood contexts, the cycles of festivals and ceremonies in public spaces and the routines, stratagems and factional battles deployed in mass politics.” 20) Navaneetha and Shefali The Space Between: Women's Hostels as Urban Spaces This study of women's hostels in Hyderabad wants to see the city through the eyes of young women, students and professionals who live in hostels, and also see how they reclaim the hostel as a common space. 21) Naveen Chander (Hindi) Suniyojit Visthapan - Aniyojit Punarvas: Kaamgaron ka shahari mukam ke liye jaddyojahad (Planned Displacement - Unplanned Rehabilitation : Struggles of Working People for Habitation in Delhi) Continuation of last year's research project interrogating the displacements and proposed rehabilitation of Metro workers in Delhi. The project interrogates issues of public space, urbanisation, the process of modernisation as effected by the Delhi Metro Project and the dynamics of labour behaviour. 22) Navin Thomas Street Musicians in Mumbai To document the lives and music of itinerant street musicians in Mumbai, and focus at the way in which they respond to the music generated by the Hindi film industry. This will involve creating a photographic profile of the spaces in which they perform together with visual and audio portraits of them through still photos and sound recordings. 23) Prabhas Ranjan (with Sadan Jha) Sheher Ke Nishan II This proposal is for the renewal of Sheher Ke Nishan. This time, it aims to concentrate on the 'production' of signs, through interviews with sign painters, sticker designers, and also to observe the economy of the circulation of signs. It will also be a continuation of the process of observing found signs, now concentrating on sites like trains and public toilets. 24) Rahaab Allana Of Urban Localities & Bazaar(s) Photography To investigate the practice, form and experience of photography within Delhi Bazaars. This will help to build a serious body of work examples of Bazaar Photography including interviews with practitioners. 25) Raheema B & Namita Shivaji Nagar Signs To develop a series of strategies for public interventions in Bangalore as a response to the communalization and parceling out of public space, using storytelling, street installations, bioscopes, sound recordings, graffiti, stickers and photography. 26) Rajaram Bhadu (Hindi) Jaipur ki Kacchi Bastiyon ka Sanskritik Adhayan (A Cultural Study of Slums in Jaipur) To study the process of cultural transition in mixed communities of Jaipur slums  through memories and identities. It wants to go beyond established parameters, by looking at cultural changes and lifestyles of  predominantly dalit bastis. 27) Rajivan S.A Subsequent Hearing: A project using sounds from the urban landscape The Project aims to record a set of sound events from the city space and recompose these events through interplay between the sound recording and subsequent hearing. The idea is to make the subsequent hearing of the recording into a fictional space that allows an indirect, and layered experience. This will thus create a soundscape of a city by recording sound events through different media to give a sense of a dispersed spatial dynamic. 28) Ravi Aggarwal and Anita Soni Jan Dedenge, Ghar Nahin: Photographic documentation of the movement against eviction by communities in the Bhatti Mines area of Delhi To focus on the Oudh and Kumhar communities settled in the Asola Bhatti Mines region of south-east Delhi, which is slated to become the Asola Sanctuary and Reserve Forest. The body of photographic materials will form an archive, and will be presented in court as evidence that the communities are not encroachers who must be evicted for environmental reasons in the course of a Public Interest Litigation. 29) Rumman Hameed Old Delhi - An Exploration of Connected Spaces To map the unique forms of communication and interaction that occur in old Delhi between the vertical levels of the different floors and of built forms, and the horizontal levels, between gallis and across mohallas. 30) Sayantoni Datta Amorphous - Kaleidoscope Images: Discovering lesbian sexualities in the media in India To look at the representation of women in popular culture, films, tele-films, soaps and internet spaces through a Lesbian sensibility, in order to claim a representative and interpretative agency for young lesbians in India. 31) Shahid Datawalla Photographic Documentation of Cinema Halls and Cinema Going Subcultures in Delhi To build a collection of photographic records and interpretations of the exterior and interior ambiences of cinema halls in Delhi including those that are closed, abandoned or transformed into markets or offices. 32) Sharmila Rege Speaking From the Margins and Across Cultures: Documenting and translating the narratives of Dalit and Black Women To translate key documents and texts of the Black Feminist movement in the United States into Marathi, and to translate key Marathi texts of Dalit Feminism into English. 33) Sougata Bhattacharya A History of the Aurora Film Corporation, Calcutta (1908 - 2002) To write a detailed history of one of the longest surviving film distribution, exhibition and production equipment hiring companies in the Bengali film industry, to detail the industrial and business history of the company, especially its decision to diversify into distribution, and not be caught in the trap of the star system. It will examine the company's correspondence, its production, its major films and all other associated activities in order to draw out what is, without doubt, a major episode in the history of cinema in Calcutta. 34) Souvik Mukherjee and Riddhi Shankar Ray Reading Books with Joysticks: Computer games and the history of reading To examine the sub-culture around gaming and the playing of various kinds of first person computer games as a variant of reading and writing. 35) Subhajit Chatterjee Romancing the Post Colonial City: Problematic of the desire to 'Settle Down'’ in urban Bengal To explore cinematic representations of public spaces in the city as the sites of romantic encounters in popular Bengali cinema and investigate the relationship with similar real-life encounters. 36) Vishwajyoti Ghosh Once Upon a Time...' - Migration, Memories & Personal Mappings A mixed media Graphic Novel in black & white combining family memoirs and history about the resettlement of post partition refugees from East Pakistan in CR Park in Delhi. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dak at sarai.net Mon Dec 2 22:56:57 2002 From: dak at sarai.net (dak at sarai.net) Date: Mon, 02 Dec 2002 17:26:57 GMT Subject: [Sarai Newsletter] New Media Art Exhibition, Lecture and Workshop Message-ID: <20021202.17265700@saumya.sarai.kit> @rt.net.uk/now : An Exhibition, Lecture and Workshop Programme, presenting facets of contemporary Internet Based Art Practice in Britain Organised by the British Council in collaboration with Sarai : The New Media Initiative, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. 2nd to the 5th December, 2002, Exhibition at the British Council, Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi. Curated by Honor Harger (Curator, webcasting, Tate Modern, London) and Pauline van Mourek Broekman (Editor, Mute - A Journal of New Media Arts, London) 4th December Presentation and Interaction with the Curators at Sarai 5th December Net Art Now - Presentation by the Curators at the British Council, followed by a public conversation, moderated by Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Sarai. This will be subsequently presented in Bangalore and Kolkata. About the Exhibition: @rt.net.uk/now is an exhibition that brings to the fore key issues in critical internet based art practice. Issues of borders and borderlessness, mapping and territories, the relationships between 'old' and 'new' media, access and control, critical reflections on the experiences of the 'thinning' of time and the thickening of the data cloud around us. Internet based art is often mistakenly regarded as art 'showcased' on the internet. This programme seeks to challenge this notion by offering instead a foregrounding of the intrinsic properties of the net as the material of a new form of art practice. This is a sensibility that is conceptual, interactive, time based and that often plays with the difficulties of access, unstable connectivity and crashing software - features that are so much part of everyday online experience. Pauline Van Moerek Broekman and Honor Harger deliberately eschew the 'flashy' and spectacular effect-laden world of mainstream web content to curate a series of online experiences that are designed to be thoughtful, and at times sharply political, in the way in which they treat the questions of online and offline territoriality and the 'fragmented public sphere' of the internet. The works presented by them represent the critical cutting edge of online art practice and include projects by leading contemporary British net artists such as Heath Bunting, Rachel Baker, Tim Knowles, Richard Wright, Andy Deck, Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie. The exhibition will chart an eclectic mini-journey through new media projects from the past few years, culminating in some of the latest and most contemporary examples in this context, based on the premise that the quasi-historical purview will give an opportunity to look at some of the questions that may have lingered in context. About the Curators Honor Harger is a new media artist who is currently working as an education and online projects officer of the new Tate Modern Gallery. Honor has been working on developing new techniques of audio streaming for quite some time as a part of a group called Radio Qualia. Van mourik Broekman is co-publisher and editor of the London based technoculture magazine Mute, whcih she co-founded with Simon Worthington as 'The Art and Technology Newspaper' in late 1994. As well as editing Mute, she writes regularly on art, media and technology for journals and books.The editors, especially Pauline van Mourik Broekmann,have created a very active and dynamic netowrk of contributors, artists, writers and critics who represent the best in  the British avant garde new media scene. Mute Magazine has been presenting public forums on new media culture at the Tate Modern. Honor and Pauline will be travelling to Kolkata and Bangalore to make presentations and conduct workshops as a forerunner to the exhibition between 6 and 15 December, 2002. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cityone at sarai.net Wed Dec 4 14:11:32 2002 From: cityone at sarai.net (City One) Date: Wed, 04 Dec 2002 14:11:32 +0530 Subject: [Sarai Newsletter] January City Conference Message-ID: <5.0.2.1.0.20021204141043.00a6d588@mail.sarai.net> City One , a cross-disciplinary conference on the urban experience in South Asia will take place between the 9th and 11th of January, 2003. This will be a significant gathering of scholars and practitioners from different fields and we hope it will open up new agendas for urban research on South Asian cities. The conference is organized by the Sarai programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. The response to the conference has been tremendous. We now have 6 plenary sessions and 18 panels spread across three days. Check the web link which will be regularly updated at: http://www.sarai.net/cityone/cityone.htm If you wish to attend the conference be sure to pre-register with us. We have very few slots left for those registering, and there is limited space. The costs are Rs 300 for the general public and Rs 100 for students. You may pay the amount on the morning of the 9th . For pre-registration write to cityone at sarai.net Ravi Sundaram City One Conference Sarai Programme, CSDS 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054, India Fax: 91-11-3943450 http://www.sarai.net/cityone/cityone.htm -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dak at sarai.net Wed Dec 4 21:30:35 2002 From: dak at sarai.net (dak at sarai.net) Date: Wed, 04 Dec 2002 16:00:35 GMT Subject: [Sarai Newsletter] December 2002 Message-ID: <20021204.16003500@saumya.sarai.kit> Contents: I @rt.net.uk/now II Workshop @ Sarai: Writers Unblock - Fiction Writing & The Daily Life of Intellectual Property Law III Films @ Sarai: Focus on the Documentary IV Tactical Media Lab @ Sarai V Launch of Deewan-e-Sarai, the Sarai Hindi Reader VI New @ Sarai Interface I @rt.net.uk/now An Exhibition, Lecture and Workshop Programme, presenting facets of contemporary Internet Based Art Practice in Britain Curated by Honor Harger (curator, webcasting, Tate Modern, London) and Pauline van Mourek Broekman (editor, Mute - A Journal of New Media Arts, London) Organised by the British Council in collaboration with Sarai: The New Media Initiative, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. December 2 - 5, 2002 Exhibition  at the British Council, Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi. December 4 Presentation and interaction with Sarai December 5 Net Art Now Presentation by the Curators at the British Council, followed by a public conversation, moderated by Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Sarai. About the Exhibition @rt.net.uk/now is an exhibition that brings to the fore key issues in critical internet-based art practice. Issues of borders and borderlessness, mapping and territories, the relationships between 'old' and 'new' media, access and control, critical reflections on the experiences of the 'thinning' of time and the thickening of the data cloud around us. Internet based art is often mistakenly regarded as art 'showcased' on the internet. This programme seeks to challenge this notion by offering instead a foregrounding of the intrinsic properties of the net as the material of a new form of art practice. This is a sensibility that is conceptual, interactive, time based and that often plays with the difficulties of access, unstable connectivity and crashing software - features that are so much part of everyday online experience. Pauline Van Moerik Broekman and Honor Harger deliberately eschew the 'flashy' and spectacular effect-laden world of mainstream web content to curate a series of online experiences that are designed to be thoughtful, and at times, sharply political in the way in which they treat the questions of online and offline territoriality and the 'fragmented public sphere' of the internet. The works presented by them represent the critical cutting edge of online art practice and include projects by leading contemporary British net artists such as Heath Bunting, Rachel Baker, Tim Knowles, Richard Wright, Andy Deck, Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie. The exhibition will chart an eclectic mini-journey through new media projects from the past few years, culminating in some of the absolute latest and most contemporary examples in this context, based on the premise that the quasi-historical purview will give an opportunity to look at some of the questions that may have lingered in context. About the Curators Honor Harger is a new media artist who is currently working as an education and online projects officer of the new Tate Modern Gallery. Honor has been working on developing new techniques of audio streaming for quite some time as a part of a group called Radio Qualia. Van Mourik Broekman is co-publisher and editor of the London based technoculture magazine Mute, which she co-founded with Simon Worthington as 'the Art and Technology Newspaper' in late 1994. As well as editing Mute, she writes regularly on art, media and technology for journals and books. The editors, especially Pauline van Mourik Broekmann, have created a very active and dynamic network of contributors, artists, writers and critics who represent the best in  the British avant garde new media scene. Mute Magazine has been presenting public forums on new media culture at the Tate Modern. Honor and Pauline will be travelling to Kolkata and Bangalore Indian cities to make presentations and conduct workshops as a forerunner to the exhibition between December 6 and 15, 2002. II Workshops at Sarai 1. December 11-12, 2002 11 am -5 pm, Sarai Interface Zone Writers Unblock with Meaghan Delahunt What is the work of a writer? How do ideas for fiction crystallize and grow into short stories... and novels? What is the daily regimen, and what are the exercises and observational practices that an aspiring writer needs to work out? How to make the "writer's block" into a piece of living textual sculpture? Meaghan Delahunt, Asialink Fellow and writer-in-residence at Sarai, will conduct a workshop on writing fiction through a series of imaginative and fun excercises that grapple with these questions. She will also share aspects of her own creative process, as it was deployed in the writing of her first novel 'In the Blue House', and offer advice and insight into working with agents, publishing houses and other practical aspects of the writer's trade. To pre-register email dak at sarai.net or call 3960040. 'In the Blue House' won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, in the Best Book category in SE Asia and South Pacific, and the Saltire Society Award in Scotland. 2. December 20-21, 2002 10 am -5 pm, Seminar Room, CSDS The Daily Life of Intellectual Property Law In the context of the global economy Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) has emerged as one of the important modes of ensuring that cultural and economic flows  occur within a given set of rules and regulations. This necessitates the  disciplining of the activities of those who operate beyond the boundaries of  the regulated formal economy. Thus IPR unfolds itself in the lives of  people on a day to day basis, determining what economic activities they may  or may not engage in. These boundaries are also backed by an omnipotent  threat of coercive violence through the use of the police force as agents enforcing IPR. At the conceptual level there have been a number of challenges posed to the philosophical and the material basis of IPR.  These range from the open source movement in software to the open  revolution in content, music and publishing. This broad movement can  be called the movement of the creative commons. What clearly inspires  the open revolution is a dissatisfaction with the philosophical premises of  IPR (romantic authorship, incentive theory, monopoly rights etc.) as well as  a recognition that, given the distribution of inequality implicit in the  global economy, there is a need to articulate a praxis that allows for more  democratic modes of participation within the global economy. Legal scholars, lawyers, researchers, media practitioners and law students from across the country will discuss these and other issues at this workshop. We will also screen The Code - Story of Linux, a film that brings many of these issues to the forefront and Arjun Raina, actor and playwright, will perform A Terrible Beauty is Born, his play on work, distance and Call Centres. III Films @ Sarai: Focus on the Documentary All screenings are at the Seminar Room, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi -110054. 1. Friday, December 13, 2002, 4:30 pm Mat / The Vote Directed by Pankaj Rishi Kumar, (2002), 80 minutes Mat/ The Vote is a filmic deconstruction of the electoral process in India. It closely examines the interests and issues that guide the performance of different players - political parties, candidates, party workers and voters - in a competition for power. The film follows Imtiaz Khan, BJP candidate, in the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections held in February, 2002, and Hemraj Saathi, a BJP worker. The overall election process in Siyana, UP, forms the matrix of the film. The crucial subjects here are the voters, divided and categorized according to caste and community. The production of Mat/ The Vote has been motivated by a need to bring the vital issues in Indian democracy to the fore, by revealing in a comprehensive and articulate manner, the failure of our society to meet even the most basic challenges of such a social and political system. 2. Friday, December 20, 2002, 4:30 pm The Code - Story of Linux Directed by Hannu Puttonen, (2001), 59 minutes The Code presents the first decade of Linux from 1991 to 2001. The film tries to tell one of the key stories of the digital age, a symbolic saga of capitalism during the last fin de siecle of the second millenium and during the early steps of the third one. It features Linux Torvalds and many of his closest allies in the development process of Linux, along with Richard Stallman. IV Tactical Media Lab @ Sarai On November 14 -16, 2002, Sarai hosted the South Asian Tactical Media Lab (TML), one of a chain of such events, that are taking place in different parts of the world (Amsterdam, Barcelona, Cluj, New York, Delhi and Sydney) as a run-up to the fourth Next 5 Minutes Conference (N5M4) in Amsterdam in 2003. Over the three days free software enthusiasts, programmers, graphic designers, filmmakers, artists, activists, members of NGOs, telecommunications experts, students and media practitioners from Mumbai, Dehradun, Kolkata, Dacca, Kathmandu, Tehran & Delhi shared ideas, experiences, problems and grievances, explored varied uses of tactical media, discussed strategies, designed posters and websites, disbanded opinions and formed new ones through panel discussions, presentations, installations, workshops and a film screening. The TML started with a very well attended public conversation between Shuddhabrata Sengupta from Sarai and David Barsamian, founder and director of Alternative Radio, an independent, award-winning, weekly radio program produced in Boulder, Colorado. David Barsamiyan is well known in Delhi through the publications of his interviews with Noam Chomsky, Edward Said and Eqbal Ahmed. This was followed by discussions and presentations on different approaches to Tactical Media. Discussions on subsequest days focussed on language and localization issues in Free Software, freedom and programming culture, ICT and its ability to look beyond the development paradigm and on the need for collaboration of new media networks in Asia. A print and web designing workshop conducted by Pradeep Saha, Managing Editor, Down to Earth, and Mrityunjoy Chatterjee, Sarai Media Lab, formed part of the TML and audio-visual and web installations were playing in the Sarai Interface Zone on all three days. The event lent itself naturally to the crystallization of a loose coalition of tactical media enthusiasts in the Asian region. The participants from Iran, Bangladesh, Nepal and various parts of India, spoke of the need to carry the energies that they had discovered through their meetings into the future. Plans were made to set up a Tactical Media Asia discussion list hosted by Sarai, and everyone was in agreement on initiating a cluster of collaborative processes, like a free software desktop in the Urdu language as a concrete instance of collaboration between people at Sarai and the LinuxIran group. For more details click on http://www.sarai.net/community/announce.htm V Launch of Deewan-e-Sarai, The Sarai Hindi Reader Sarai launched the first Hindi Reader Deewan-e-Sarai 01: Media Vimarsh://Hindi Janpad (Media Discourses:// Hindi Public Domain) on Saturday November 30. Prof. VB Singh, Director, CSDS, welcomed the guests and speakers while Prof. DL Sheth moderated the presentations. Ravikant, co-editor, Deewan 01, gave a brief introduction to the series that is designed to cover a whole range of issues from the history and practice of technology (Electricity, Railways, Computer, Internet) to city, films, legal debates around copyright, surveillance and information politics, history of labour and historiography. Sanjay Sharma, co-editor, Deewan 01, presented an overview of the volume. This was followed by readings from Deewan 01. Ruchika read a poem, 'Internet par Shaadi', and 'Aag ka Copyright', Ravikant read out his translation of Bapsi Sidhwa's 'Television Satyagraha ke woh Din', an essay on the day in the 1970s when the Indian film, Pakeeza, was broadcast on Amritsar TV and how Lahore went berserk. David Lelyweld who was a witness to the Pakeeza screening shared his memories of the day in private conversations later. Sanjay Sharma then read out extracts from his rather funny memoir on the BBC Hindi service. After the readings invited speakers commented on the book. Much of the interactions revolved around the use of language by Hindi writers and publishers. Historian Sudheer Chandra praised the prose and supported the Deewan's practice of going against the dominant notions of shabd-maitri, whereby people do not allow so-called Hindi words to mingle with so-called Urdu ones,  but he also pointed out a couple of factual inaccuracies. Sanjeev Kumar, lecturer of Hindi at Delhi University, liked the name Deewan but was critical of the Deewan's assumptions about the Hindi Public, especially its literary publics, and pointed out the overwhemingly secular mood of high Hindi literature. He sought to nuance the notion of tadbhavaization, or corruption, by appealing for the acceptance of tadbhavised or apbhramshised Urdu as well. He also talked of the inherent lack in training that allows most writers the competence to play around with words derived from Sanskrit rather than with Perso-Arabic derivations. By referring to current trends in the Hindi print media he pointed out the disappearance of not only the nuqta but other diacritical marks like the chandrabindu,and the halant, in an effort of simplifying Hindi typography and moulding it for computer screens. Aditya Nigam, Fellow, CSDS, distinguished these two kinds of disappearance and celebrated the kind of language Deewan seems to have inaugurated. He also praised the hard work put in by the Translation Unit at Sarai. Language debates brought forth passionate interventions from the floor and Rana Behl, Delhi University, Yogendra Yadav, CSDS, and Vijay Pratap, Lokayan, presented their own insights as language practitioners. This interactive 'lokarpan' went down well with the gathering and we are sure to hear more on this for some time. VI New @ Sarai Interface The Sarai Digital Interface, available on the terminals in the Sarai Interface Zone, is an in-depth presentation of Sarai's activities and concerns that also contains areas of interactivity. The Interface is designed to let the visitor to Sarai have a hands-on feel of the kind of work we do, the issues that we are interested in and to allow for an interaction with Sarai projects in various stages of development. It contains a digital gallery and also acts as a public platform for the sharing of ideas, knowledge and creativity, a digital bulletin board for posting messages about public concerns as well as an evolving resource that is built and sustained by the community that grows around Sarai. The Interface can be used as a space to register subjective experiences of living in urban spaces. The recent additions to the digital gallery in the Interface are: Cold Glory at Ground Zero Photographs by Monica Narula Exactly a year after September 11, 2001, New York city, under a clear sky. A nervous flutter of US flags at every block are signs of remembrance, and foreboding. And talk of war brings alive a cold glory in early autumn. Monica Narula follows the flag and its strange appearances, on pavements, walls, alleyways, and the outer perimeter of Ground Zero. Graffiti and Signage in the City Photo-essays by Sadan Jha and Prabhas Ranjan. 2 HTML photoessays documenting the pictorial modes of visual representation through graffiti and signage ranging from the religious, the superstitious and the occult to everyday announcements in the city of Delhi. ------------- That's all this month. We hope to see you at the screenings and the workshops. Cheers, Ranita -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: