Sarai, a new media centre in Delhi (India) is running a community project called CyberMohalla:

"Mohalla in Hindi and Urdu means neighbourhood. Sarai’s Cybermohalla project takes on the meaning of the word mohalla, its sense of alleys and corners, its sense of relatedness and concreteness, as a means for talking about one’s ‘place’ in the city, and in cyberspace.

The present selection of writings is culled from the diaries maintained by young people working at the Compughar in the LNJP basti, Delhi. A working-class settlement constantly threatened by dislocation, the basti is in the heart of the city though invisible to Delhi’s many millions. Compughar, started in May 2001, is a small media lab running on free software and low-cost media equipment. It is a collaborative effort between Sarai and Ankur, an NGO experimenting for the last two decades with alternatives in education.

The young people (mainly young women) who come to the Compughar are between the ages of 15 and 20. Most of them are school irregulars and dropouts. Their writings can be seen as a database of narrative, comment, observation, wordplay and reflection. To us this selection evokes a sense of the everyday that gestures towards an intricate social ecology. We invite you to enjoy and engage with this specific mode of writing the city."

July 25, 2003 | 02:20 PM