Notes on Ambivalent Pedagogy from the Cybermohalla Experience

Dear All,

Below is a paper I wrote a while back from my experiences in 
Cybermohalla. The paper is soon to be published in a reader on Utopian 
Pedagogy (ed Marc Cote et al).

Comments and feedback is most welcome!

best
shveta

**********


Before Coming Here, Had You Thought of a Place Like This?
Notes on Ambivalent Pedagogy from the Cybermohalla Experience [1]

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The formal definition of a pedagogue in a working class locality could 
be of a figure who, through interactions, will bring into the 
consciousness of students a reality beyond their immediate reach; a 
figure who will bring into their life world skills from other locations 
that will put them in a more advantageous position in society.

The frame of the life world of the pedagogue is visible, articulate. It 
is in a position to propose a vision for the other world - one of 
empowering it through intervention. The inner world of the "student" is 
of anticipation, anger, restlessness. It lives with different 
intensities of indignity and humiliation born of the derision felt at 
the perception that it needs to, and can be, 'transformed'. It lives in 
the troubled terrain of entitlement to, and gratitude for, as well as 
suspicion of intervention.

Reverberations of the question, 'Before Coming Here, Had You Thought of 
a Place Like This?' offset the stability of this figure [2]. The idea of 
young people in working class settlements as tabula rasa is displaced. 
What replaces it? The question calls for a realignment of positions, 
redrawing of assumptions and protocols of interactions. What emerges?

"The Edges of Thought"

Raju Malyal, 18 years, lives in Dakshinpuri Resettlement Colony in South 
Delhi [3]. A student of class tenth, he attends afternoon school on 
weekdays, and during the weekend he helps out at the small eating joint 
run by his father in the neighbourhood. Raju, in a public reading before 
two hundred and fifty friends, aquaintances and strangers, reads:

"I  wanted to think about what Shamsher Ali had written in his text, 
'The Edges of Thought'. I read the text thrice, and in doing that, felt 
as if Shamsher Ali was sitting in front of me all this while, talking to 
me about it" [4].

Shamsher, 18 years, dropped out of school before completing his tenth 
class. "No one cares what you do in afternoon school. I wasn't learning 
anything, anyway". Shamsher lives in Lok Nayak Jai Prakash (LNJP) Colony 
in Central Delhi [5].

The intimacy, desire and searching quality of Raju's narration betray 
that the dominant co-ordinates through which the lives of young people 
are mapped - the home, the school and the workspace - far from fill all 
existing spaces to engage with subjectivity.

Lately, Shamsher has started spending his early mornings at a workshop 
in the colony that produces cardboard boxes. Reflecting on his routines, 
he writes, "I like to hang around there and chat. The time I spend there 
are the only moments of respite I get from thinking. Thought is my 
enemy" [6].

There is a rawness to this recognition of living with the 
incomprehensibility of certain conditions of social realities, and a 
capacity to live with that vulnerability. Inside the stubborn structures 
of institutions, frameworks and discourses, is a search for the edges of 
thought - the whispering, agile peripheries of the mind that imagine, 
flow, combat, seek, assert and create. This needs a space that can 
support and allow for this search [7]. It craves and ferrets out 
challenging friendships that nurture thought in a manner that does not 
read the rawness and vulnerability of a stutter as defeat or 
helplessness, but as pregnant with possibilities of new discoveries [8].

Raju reads on, "...sometimes, we create boundaries in our thoughts, 
stopping ourselves from thinking, stopping ourselves from finding the 
edges of our thoughts, from where we can plunge into newer depths. Why 
do we do that? Why do we create shores of the ocean of thinking, or 
disallow ourselves from moving towards horizons by being swept away by 
waves?"

"A Thought Full Stop"

Reading her text to her peers at the lab about a visit to the Jama 
Masjid in Old Delhi, not far from the neighbourhood, Azra described how 
she drifted through the city, first on foot, and then on a 
cycle-rickshaw [9]. Her brief, passing description of the rickshaw 
driver caught the attention of a practitioner from Sarai who was also 
present at the lab. The description was shy, as if Azra had found 
something disturbing about the rickshaw driver. She had written, "He was 
a young man. He was wearing pants and shirt and looked like he had been 
through some years of formal schooling. Fair and handsome, he seemed to 
be a Kashmiri. I thought, 'Bechara (Poor thing)! Surely he can get 
himself a better job than driving a cycle rickshaw'."

Sensing that Azra had perhaps unconsciously adopted a popular critical 
stand considered necessary in talking about education and unemployment 
among city youth, the practitioner probed further than the description 
carried him. He asked, "Azra, can you tell me a little more about the 
rickshaw driver? Why did you call him 'bechara'?" Surprised at how 
little she remembered about him, and that 'bechara' was a conjunction 
she had used in her text to move on to a description of the street by 
shifting her gaze from him, Azra, her eyes on the text, reflected, "By 
calling him 'bechara', I created a distance between him and my thought. 
'Bechara' is not a conjunction for different thoughts here. It's a 
thought full stop!"

Bechara is the singular, the figure pushed out of our imagination by our 
meta-narratives. A voice muffled, a story silenced, a trajectory of 
thought left unmapped and unexplored, save as an evidence for, an 
affirmation of our ways of thinking - another statistic. These full 
stops are like barricades, creating boundaries around our thought, a 
closed community of ideas.

Helping out to conduct a survey to guage perceptions about caste and 
religion among children in his colony, Lakhmi found the methodology 
evolved very troubling. Each time the child being asked the 
objective-type questions was reticent, the interviewer was expected to 
guess the child's response and fill in the answers. "I simply couldn't 
understand," he said, "How am I supposed to decide whether the child's 
silence means 'yes' or 'no'?"

It is perhaps on the silencing of many that knowledge is created. A 
pedagogue working within realities marked by inequality, conflict and 
contestation cannot be innocent of the intimate relationship between 
knowledge and the politics of silence.

A couple with a newborn child refuses to discuss with the family their 
acute desire to move out of the close-knit, protective neighbourhood 
they have lived in for years. A student drops out of school for the fear 
of the indignity of being called a failure. A young man labouring at the 
construction site quietly daydreams through the spray of invectives from 
the supervisor during the cycles of carrying bricks to the eleventh floor.

These absences in life - the inadequacies of biographies - are the 
inadequacies of speech.  Silences reside in the recognition of the 
politics of these lingering inadequacies.

Crowds carry silences with them. The singular, distanced figure devoid 
of its biography, multiplies to become a mass, indistinguishable in its 
features, so remote. Azra says, "Sometimes it seems like a bee hive, 
sometimes like insects crawling on the ground... There are many sounds, 
but none reach our ears properly" [10]. In the smarting relations of 
full stops and silences, silencing and knowledge, what can be a 
knowledge producer's methods of engagement?

"The Gaps"

On a dark winter evening in early January in 2002, during the LNJP 
Compughar's trip to Bombay, we reached the Dadar metro station bustling 
with the hurrying commuters moving into and pouring out of the local 
trains. Falling into step with a stream of commuters heading for the 
exit, we reached the foot-over bridge to the vegetable market.  Swinging 
batons of policemen attempted to control and bring to order the 
hotch-potch of the bodies - some halting for breath, others finding 
their own rhythms and directions. Underneath, the market was bright with 
halogen lamps lit in different stalls. Crowds thronged the stalls, the 
market was flooded, bodies packed together- a sea of heads that could 
allow no one admittance. Still, the crowd seemed to be swelling by the 
minute.

We decided to walk through the crowd in pairs. Reaching the other side, 
we were surprised at the ease with which we had moved through the crowd. 
Someone from the group said, "There were gaps in the crowd which we 
could not see from above. Once we entered the crowd, we could walk 
through these intervening spaces."

Later, in a text from the experience, Azra wrote:

"The crowd from in front -
You see faces, different features and appearances that could not be seen 
from above, expressions on faces. Some faces seem to be searching 
something. Sometimes, the search seems to be for a glimpse of the 
unknown, and on other occassions, it is a somewhat intimate search."

Standing on the footover bridge presented a distanced view from afar. 
The frame of the visual field, removed from the experience of the market 
and created from a height, produced anxiety, fear. This was a particular 
vantage point. But knowledge, as the movement towards and into the crowd 
suggested to us, is a question of different perspectives, not specific 
positions. The tensions between differences of perspective were productive.

A crowd demands to be entered, experienced. The gaps - ruptures, 
disjunctions, joints - present themselves as possibilities, points of 
entry. It is in bringing near, in moving through the gaps that an 
engagement is sought.

"Speech without Fear and Fearless Listening"

Knowledge is about the bold and simultaneous existence of a multiplicity 
of voices that fragment our conception of reality, decenter the act of 
production of knowledge, the translation of life worlds; where the edges 
of our worlds are in conversation with one another, not muted and 
silenced. Speech of millions is of essence in this. What witholds and 
prevents speech is the fear of listening to too many voices, a fear that 
a cacophony of sounds will result. But there is a richness in the the 
multiplicity of a band when it plays with myriad instruments, when there 
is improvisation, and more than one sound can be heard.

The twenty two year-old Azra says, "The simultaneous existence of 
multiple, diverse voices means there is speech without fear, with 
freedom and dignity. And that, in turn, implies that there be 
responsible and fearless listening". Being in the network of knowledge 
production is as much about being a server, as a host or a client.

Speech is imbricated in the politics of space, and played out in our 
everyday lives. When the young people at the LNJP lab decided to 
circulate their writings in the colony through the public form of a wall 
magazine, they were faced with a peculiar problem [11]. As youngsters, 
they had till now been addressed by (elders in) the colony. The question 
they were now confronted by was of finding a way of addressing the 
colony. The fear was that even as they could, in the beginning, skirt 
topics which they knew would earn them the disapproval of their elders, 
what about issues for which norms were not specified? Three issues of 
the wall magazine, named Ibarat (Inscription), were brought out in quick 
succession. But following these, questions of what terrain to chose, 
what topics to select, what issues to discuss, what mode of writing to 
adopt, superceded and there has been a long pause before the fourth 
Inscription. Narration is halted because it does not find a context.

Narration is a function of desire. Desire is not person-centric, but for 
a constellation -of people, settings, memories, preferences - in 
relation with one another which originate and extend beyond an 
individual. Narration flows between these elements, and this flow is 
made possible by a curiosity to hear. To narrate is to relive an 
experience through the act of telling, through speech. This reliving 
requires a nurturing context of friendship, a challenging and 
compassionate listening, which evokes and is receptive of a narration. 
And to listen, then, is to tussle with your desire, to be vulnerable in 
a search for a means to look at yourself anew, to question how another 
has been imagined. There must be so many narrations that are never made 
because they do not find gradients they can flow towards. Narrations 
seek this terrain of hospitality, this context created by thirst and 
difference, this desire.

A pedagogue is not a library of known and catalogued books that can be 
issued out. And a naraation is not a requisition for a title or an 
author. What is the desire that the pedagogue - the guest the young 
people of the locality host - imbricated in?

"To think you are alone would be gross injustice"

The formidable discourse of labouring rides over social inequality. 
Here, the question of earning a livelihood, to enter the labour market, 
is a very important one. This livelihood discourse is one of computer 
literacy, of speed - it requires skills in typing, preparing excel 
sheets, making database entries, writing letters, designing pamphlets, 
cards etc: i.e., computer-based economic activities requiring low skill 
levels. The emphasis is on efficency, dexterity, micro-software 
training. This vocational training is offered by a number of IT 
institutes mushrooming in and around working class settlements [12]. It 
presents the familiar and troubling disjunction between two imaginaries 
- the discourse on livelihood for the working class, and knowledge 
production.

The tussle between the two imaginaries once showed in a dialogue at the 
labs around the meaning of working with computers implying the necessity 
to learn to type at a good speed [13]. The question that arose was of 
the relation between the flow of the keyboard and the flow of thought. 
The overpowering labouring discourse, because it blocks off the 
possibility to think of people outside the language of productivity, as 
cultural producers, makes it extremely difficult for the young people to 
suggest to themselves that technology can be entered through creativity 
in the technological space [14].

The dialogue at the lab continued by drawing out the difference between 
a "hobby" and a "line" (career choice). "Hobby" is the sphere of the 
creative, of playfulness and inventiveness. A "line" is what one pursues 
in life to earn a living, to secure an income, and this is at the cost 
of the creative instincts. With a rejection of folk forms and public 
cultures of story telling, or other modes that are associated with a 
rich tradition of creative resources, and which erupt sporadically on 
the urban scape during religious festivals and events organised to 
showcase them, the sphere of everyday expressions of creativity searches 
outlets and forms.

In this loss of language around creativity, training to work in beauty 
parlours (learning bridal make-up, applying mehandi etc.) is the most 
popular career choice for girls in working class settlements. Men may 
become part of local dancing or theatre troupes, or painting billboards, 
signs, etc. These become modes for bringing the "hobby" and the "line" 
together. These micro-practices are an assertion by the young people of 
their creative urges.

'Unlikely encounters' [15] with Free Software programmers has opened up 
another dimension: the most interesting conversations happen when 
programmers visiting the labs talk about their experiences of sharing 
skills in a creative community which has participants from different 
backgrounds, and in different geographical locations [16].

This creates a fascinating context, in which you imagine yourself, and 
also the locality, in the larger matrix of other spaces. It shows the 
possibility of a conversational and practice-based universe where there 
are people who will find excitement in your quirkiness, play, interests, 
ideas. Yashoda, who came to the lab two years ago with a turbulent 
personal background, and so a mistrust for all forms of determinate 
aggregates, writes, "To think you are alone would be gross injustice". 
She is a prolific writer, and one of the strongest votaries of ensembles 
formed on the relationship of thought and creativity.

What these interactions and dialogues gesture towards is the reality 
that one can have a tranformative relationship with technology - and not 
just be addressed by it. This is a critical shift in register. This is a 
universe where your thought is of consequence in a larger framework of 
production of knowledge.

"What do words contain?"

Word is
a memory: which gives the word its recognition.
a story: an incident that keeps the memory of the word alive.
time: every word carries with it the shadow of time.
image: an image is associated with every word.
thought: different people think differently of the same word.
sound: a sound follows every word [17].

This textural world of the word lies beyond the realm of judgements. It 
is not bound by the binaries of ordinary & special, valuable & useless, 
good & bad, ugly & beautiful. Fertile and mutable, it evokes and invites 
more narrations, linking with other experiences. Nisha Kaushal from 
Dakshinpuri says, "Utterances are suggestions for others to open up. You 
don't define a boundary of the conversation and it flows through 
suggestion upon suggestion". In this mode of excavation of perspectives 
and meanings in an ensemble of producers, a universe of hyperlinked 
experiences emerges, rhizomic in its growth, inclusive in its spread and 
open in its propensity to encounters.

This accretive relay of experiences as texts and conversations creates 
an interdependence and densification of ideas - ideas collide and 
mingle, open out and jostle. This is  practice-based, and it flows from 
everyday experiences.

When Nasreen at LNJP narrated her experience of witnessing an accident, 
her peers Neelofar and Shamsher responded -

[Nasreen]
Because the bus was crowded, the driver was speeding, halting at the 
stops very briefly. One man, who was trying to get on, was clutching on 
to the handle on the door. He was trying to put one foot on the steps of 
the bus. But unfortunately, he slipped, and along with that, his hand 
also lost its grip on the handle. He fell. The driver drove on.

[Neelofar]
When I was listening to Nasreen's story I was  remembering scenes when 
people, specially boys, run to get on moving buses. Some do this because 
the bus doesn't stop long eneough, while others get off the bus and then 
get on again when the bus starts to move. Bus conductors do this 
often... I like it when people first let the woman, or family members 
they are travelling with, board the bus, and then get on.

[Shamsher]
Listening to the story, I feel like I am the driver and am driving the 
vehicle, looking at either side. I am glancing at the rear view mirror, 
and looking at the road as well, which will take the travellers in the 
bus to their destination. But my attention is not on the passengers at 
all. I am waiting for the destination [18].

Unstable and mobile links between experiences, thoughts, ideas emerge. 
Conceptual connections between ideas and of different producers makes 
possible a networked thickening of the emergent concepts.  The diversity 
and richness of experiences and ways of thinking creates the possibility 
of the emergence of a relational knowledge field.

Yashoda Singh, at the LNJP lab, writes about her body, and how she 
perceives her room through it:

"The wind has entered with such force from the chinks in our walls, that 
a shiver has run down my whole body. The upper part of my body is 
outside the quilt, and wind is entering from the sides as well. The wind 
comes and makes me aware of its coldness... My back is really hurting 
now. So I should lie down. But what's this? The whitewash on the walls 
of our house is just like the pair of lips of a woman who has put 
lipstick on one of the lips, but not on the other. Because the walls are 
whitewashed, but not the roof..." [19]

The intimacy of the narration, its searching quality and metaphorical 
evocations is striking. Yashoda thinks through the lived experience of 
space through claims and withdrawals, through her own body. The body is 
inscribed in different ways in different narratives.

Lakhmi writes about Ashoki, who cleans sewers in his colony by going 
inside them. He has written the text in an autobiogrpahical mode, 
imagining himself to be Ashoki, and his encounter with Lakhmi Chand's 
gaze in the crowd of bystanders (residents of the colony) as he enters a 
sewer:

"The boy who had come to file the complaint was also there. He was 
looking at me with surprised eyes. Maybe he was thinking that when he 
had come ot the office, I was wearing clean clothes and talking to him 
like an officer. But today he was surprised at seeing me in dirty 
clothes. I was laughing within. In his eyes, I was first an officer, a 
sahib. He had called me sir. But what would he call me now? Maybe he was 
also thinking of the same thing" [20].

The text raises the question of how the body is socially perceived, 
problematising the fixedness of the representational frame around filth, 
cleanliness, and notions of waste and disposal. What emerges through 
these is a complex narrative of the body - the body is imagined, 
narrated, socialised. The complex - rich, layered, contradictory - 
terrain of experience and body & social dignity allows for a networked 
thickening of ideas.

This practice-based universe produces a contingent, unstable and 
relational knowledge field. The 'pedagogue' is a node in this network, 
searching the emergent with producers/practitioners.

"What is it that flows between us?"

This practice of producing and building in a network resonates with and 
draws from other practices and philosophies - for instance, the Free 
Software modes of production. Virtual technological practices inform, 
further complicate and deepen the imagination and everyday at the labs.

Sharing of resources through peer-to-peer networks, a class of 
applications that takes advantages of resources - storage, cycles, human 
presence - available along the links between routers of packages of 
data, presents an actual and realisable technological juncture as well 
as a metaphorical resonance with the peer-based practice at the labs. 
The agility and improvisation of tactical media provide a larger context 
of multi-authored production and a network to link with as producers and 
creators. Practices like hyperlinking, lists and weblogs provide tools 
and practices for cultural producers.

All of these have made possible the creation of and search for new forms 
of knowledge, communities and practices at Cybermohalla [21].

Ambivalent Pedagogy

Ambivalence is an affirmation of contradictory perspectives, vatage 
points, positionings and feelings at the same time. Ambivalent pedagogic 
processes gesture towards the porosity of the boundaries between the 
nodes of a server and a learner, realised through thinking about and 
practicing in networked relations of production of knowledge. Different 
nodes produce knowledge, and through the contingent and specific 
relations formed between ideas, experiences and practices, together 
search the emergent. Critical to the engagement is an acute 
consciousness of and constant reflection on the relations between 
friendship and knowledge, knowledge and conditionalities of speech, 
knowledge and silences, knowledge and sharing. It is from these that an 
ethics of the interaction in each site-specific unlikely encounter evolve.

The encounters multiply over time. Seeking unlikely encounters, as 
guests in another locality, Yashoda, Azra, Lakhmi, Neelofar, Raju, 
Nasreen, Suraj will carry with them and receive anew the reverberations 
of the question, 'Before Coming Here, Had You Thought of a Place Like 
This?' The question would be differently inflected, every time, in each 
site, layering and thickening its experience and meanings.

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ENDNOTES

[1] Mohalla in hindi and urdu means neighbourhood. Ankur-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 of talking about ones place in the city, and in cyberspace. In its 
broadest imagination, it is a desire for a wide and horizontal network 
(both real and virtual) of voices, sounds and images in dialogue and 
debate. A step towards the realisation of this desire is through 
engendering self-regulated media labs in working class settlements in 
Delhi, which can facilitate the becoming of researcher-practitioners 
from the locality. The young people who come to the labs are between 15 
and 24.

[2] This question is often asked to visitors by the practioners at the 
labs. Is it a question of suspicion of a stranger? Or an assiduous 
search for a relationship of dignity? There is a strong realisation at 
the labs that their life world is perceived as curios in a 'waiting 
room'. To Yashoda, a practitioner at the LNJP lab, a khaas nazar, a 
special look cast at her, is a gaze that produces a feeling of 
suffocation. She writes, "What can be said of the looks that are not 
from strangers, but well-wishers? They seem unfamiliar sometimes. What 
are these looks? They leave a trace of suffocation in my life, which 
otherwise seems to be going on just fine. Even if I want to tell others 
about these looks, I can't. Because I don't understand them myself. 
Because in the courthouse of glances, there are no eyewitnesses".

[3] Between 1975 and 1979, during the state of Emergency, Delhi saw the 
violent clearing away of irregular settlements under the aegis of 
Jagmohan, vice-chairman of the Delhi Development Authority. The 
dislocated inhabitants were sought to be resettled in undeveloped plots 
in the fringes of the city earmarked as resettlement colonies. Now 
bustling with life and not as weak infrastructurally, this is the 
beginning of the official history of Dakshinpuri.

[4] The public reading was at the launch of the Cybermohalla 
publication, 2003 - a Book Box with ten booklets of texts from the labs, 
five postcards, and a CD with animations, a sound & text film and Free 
Software for Windows. For the Book Box, and the full text of Raju's 
reading, see -
http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/book02/booklets.htm

[5] LNJP is officially a slum settlement. The irregular dwelling started 
appearing in the early 60s, when people began settling in the unoccupied 
land beside the LNJP hospital. Over the years, many more people made 
homes here and the density of the colony grew. LNJP lives with an 
everyday threat of demolition. In its neighbourhood is Turkhman Gate - a 
settlement with a predominantly muslim population, which became a site 
of massive demolition during 1975-77.  After demolition, the residents 
were sent to different resettlement colonies.

[6] For Shamsher's full text, see 
http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/book02/pages/pdfs/questionsbetray.pdf

[7] Compughar, or the Abode of Computers - as the Cybermohalla media 
labs are called by the young practitioners - is one such liminal space. 
The young adults practicing at the labs meet on a daily basis, grappling 
with ideas and stuttering into concepts through a sustained practice of 
sharing through conversation. The LNJP Compughar was set up in May 2001, 
and the Compughar at Dakshinpuri in August 2002.

[8] It is critical for the pedagogue to have a deeper understanding of 
the peripheral realities of any such space. Individuals are not 
discrete, separate units, but are experientially imbricated in a social 
network that extends beyond them. An understanding of the implications 
of this  vis-a-vis an institution like the school, which disects the 
experiential and the network from which a student emerges, is extremely 
significant for an experiment like Cybermohalla. Prabhat Jha, one of the 
co-ordinators of the Cybermohalla Project writes, "The question we must 
constantly ask ourselves is whether we see ourselves working among the 
30 or 40 young people immediately in front of us, or among the locality 
which they have emerged from and are a part of. As soon as we bring this 
into view, the entire scene changes. If we see ourselves as working in a 
community, it is not possible for us to forget that along with the 
practitioners are their families, and along with the families, the 
neighbourhood. That is, the sense that your work has reverberations in 
spaces outside of the immediately visible context of the labs, and is 
constantly a receiver of reverberations from other spaces, is a very 
important one". These ideas will be elaborated in a forthcoming article 
by Prabhat K. Jha.

[9] Over the last two years at the labs, a sustained and regular 
practice of writing has emerged. Everyone writes in diaries - small 
notebooks with ruled sheets. These writings, some of which are in the 
biographical register, some in the register of space, others through 
engagement with another biography, are a rich database of narrative, 
comment, word-play and reflection.

[10]  For the full text of 'Crowds from Afar, from in Front and from 
Within', see 
http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/book02/pages/pdfs/eyescrowd.pdf

[11] The wall magazine is a primary "public form" of the labs. Texts are 
written and selected for a twelve page wall magazine designed and 
produced at the lab. It is then photocopied and circulated in the 
locality by being put up on public walls. The first three wall magazines 
were on names of the lanes in the colony, on work, and about the trip to 
Bombay. Translated versions of these issues can be found on the Sarai 
website -
http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/ibarat01/english01.htm
http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/ibarat02/pages/english02.htm
http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/ibarat03/PAGES/english03.htm

[12] Since the mid-1950s, the post-colonial state in India concentrated 
substantial resources into the production of engineers, providing 
well-formulated courses and educational infrastructure. This, coupled 
with proficiency in English and mathematics in the middle-classes, 
engendered a huge labour force that entered the IT industry from the 
early 1980s. This labour force is integrated into the global production 
of software and services, synchronising well with the provision of 
infrastructure for research and development by western economies.

At the second level, the state-run industrial training institutes showed 
a great inertia in moving away from training their students for the 
manufacturing industries. The IT expansion at the popular level happened 
through a massive proliferation of small and mid-scale privately funded 
software usage training institutes. This is the local labour force that 
does the desk-top operations which run media production, print design, 
graphics and popular web interfacing.


[13] The labs are equipped with three computers each, a scanner, a 
printer, a sound booth, portable sound recording units, and digital and 
analogue cameras. The computers run on Free Software. Image Manipulation 
software, GIMP and text editor, Open Office are the applications used 
for making animations and typing in and formatting texts. The practice 
of taking photographs, recording sounds, creating animations seems to 
have an archival impetus, rather than being object oriented, or with an 
output in mind. They are constantly worked with, and also catalogued and 
logged. This archive then, will create a centrifugal force, where 
instead of being worked with to be presented to a public, it may create 
a pull -the "public" must come to see it.

[14] An interesting phenomenon is that while there is such a pressure 
from the labour market for a familiarity with the regime of propreitary 
software, a brilliantly dynamic and productive culture of copying - eg. 
MP3s - is part of this very environment. It is in the alleys and small 
rooms right here, that the nodes of production that sustain the grey 
market economies, thrive. These nodes, through which the locality enters 
the larger politics of economic transactions as a producer, are part of 
the everyday reality of these practitioners. And it is in this context 
that the cassettes with the assorted favourite tracks and the CDs with 
the latest film, burned before its release, are freely circulated among, 
and copied for peers.

[15]  I would like to thank Park Fiction (www.parkfiction.org) for their 
rich concept of Unlikely Encounters: Groups that develop tools, 
attitudes, courage, practices, programmes, that make unlikely 
encounters, meetings and connections more likely, search for them, jump 
over cultural or class barriers, go where no one goes, look where no 
one's looking. They do not let their activities be reduced to symbolic 
action, mirroring, critique, negation, or analysis of their 
powerlessness nor do they muddle along in their assigned corner. 
http://www.parkfiction.org/unlikelyencounters/begriffe.php

[16] Among many other programmers, Arish Zaini of the GNU/Linux Users' 
Group in Iran visited Delhi in early 2002. He has been working with a 
small group to develop a Persian language KDE desktop. During his visit, 
he spent a day at the Compughar in LNJP, sharing his work with young 
women proficient in Urdu and in working with the English language 
desktop. In the convivial atmosphere of a mutual exchange of personal 
stories and interests in technology and language, a small promise of CD 
to install the Persian desktop at the lab was made and sealed. Now, from 
the Persian desktop, an Urdu language desktop can be developed and 
shared at the lab.

[17] For the full text of 'A Word', written by Suraj Rai after a 
discussion among the practitioners at the LNJP Lab, see 
http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/book02/pages/pdfs/wordscontain.pdf

[18] For texts from Nasreen's other peers at LNJP, see 
http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/book02/pages/pdfs/eyescrowd.pdf

[19]  For Yashoda's full text, see 
http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/book02/pages/pdfs/beforecoming.pdf

[20] For Lakhmi's full text, see 
http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/book02/pages/pdfs/inversion.pdf

[21] From the Technological Imagination of Cybermohalla, version 01 -"Is 
there a significance in interaction and collaboration with peers? What 
does it mean when edges, margins and in-between spaces become alive, 
pulsating, interacting? When clients are also servers? When users are 
also producers; browsers are also editors? When centers are dislocated 
and resources are dispersed? When diversity and multiplicity thrive? 
When ideas are not static or owned, but shared and developed 
collaboratively? When unpredictable addresses and routes with unstable 
connectivity are generators of knowledge, sites of narration, and nodes 
and zones of comunication?" For the full text, see - 
http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/book01/pages/194-215.pdf
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