[Reader-list] sarai.txt 2.1

[Aarti]

Sarai txt 2.1
*SHIFT*

01 March 2005 - 01 May 2005

Content of the text version:
(Does not include the poster and the back page)

write to
broadsheet at sarai.net

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 

CONTENT:

SIDE 01
- Shift!
- When Names are Swept Away / Notes from the Diary of a City Researcher 
/ Taha Mehmood (Researcher, Information Society, Sarai)
- My Mobile Provider Thinks I am a Tsunami Victim / Paul Keller / from 
the Reader List
- Distress Definitions: Falling Between the Lines / Clifton Rozario and 
team / from the Reader List
- Story: A museum of objects

SIDE 02
- Letter to the Reader / Dear Anonymous
- Seeing with Cardboard Days / Log from documentary Cardboard Days, dir. 
Veronica Souto
- Improbable Imaginings of Improbable Spaces / from presentation by 
Sharon Daniels, at 'Contested Commons, Tresspassing Publics' conference, 
Sarai-CSDS + ALF
- No Thoroughfare / Cybermohalla
- A Man with His Notes in the City / Bhagwati Prasad, researcher, PPHP, 
Sarai
- Genderchanger (definitions)
- Why Do You Travel? / Excerpt from talk by Lusia Passerini
- Traces, Imprints, Flows / Independent Fellows, Sarai

- Credits

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 


SIDE 01:

- Shift!

paradigm shift, tectonic shift, shifting sands, shifting path, shifting 
course, late shift, night shift, make shift, graveyard shift, swing 
shift, circadian shift, tautomeric shift, shift in emphasis, down shift, 
up shift, stick shift, great vowel shift, shifting languages, language 
shift, shifting blame, shifting burden, functional shift, population 
shift, shifty-eyed, einstein shift, zero phase shift mirror, shift 
clicking, red shift, shifting gears, shape shifting, shifting target, 
shifting boundaries, shift the scene, shifting center, shiftless, shift 
off, ever-shifting, shifting cultivation, perceptual shift, time-shifting

***

- When Names are Swept Away / Notes from the Diary of a City Researcher 
/ Taha Mehmood (Researcher, Information Society, Sarai)

13-01-05

I am reading an excellent and insightful article by Jane Caplan on, 
among other things, the politics of naming and identity. In the wake of 
the Tsunami catastrophe, some of the issues raised were unfortunately 
very timely. Some ideas that I have gleaned from the essay...

Since the 11th century BC administrators around the world have been 
devising ways and means to deal with the question of how to re-identify 
someone as the same person he was once known to be. How can one 
re-individuate a person from other’s like him?

Solutions came, but they were few and far between. They came as edicts, 
decrees, laws, ordinances, administrative ramblings and diktats of the 
sovereign.

Regimes were set in place to mark populations-first at birth, then 
marriage and at death- till finally every social transaction that an 
individual undertook during the course of her lifetime, became an 
instance for enumeration.

Laws were formulated to assign a the name to a particular person. For 
instance, 16^th century France had laws which allowed a person to take 
assume from a given set of names only, and restrictions were in place to 
disallow citizens to be named Jesus or Babeline or Lassalline etc.

Shifting, moving populations were made immobile by criminalizing 
movement across, and within, territories. Identity was made the primary 
and legitimate token for every ‘citizen’ to have a justifiable existence.

But what happens when these tokens suddenly disappear? Say, due to a 
natural calamity such as the Tsunami?

The recent Tsunami disaster has left hundreds of thousands of people 
stranded in the Andaman and Nicobar islands. The biggest problem for 
these people is yet to come-the loss of Identity Documents. As the ocean 
spitted out and sucked in water, it took away with it everything they 
ever had, including their identity papers-ration cards, birth 
certificates, certificates of marriage and death.

What happens when your ‘tokens of trust’-your voter ID card, driving 
license, passport, ration card and property documents-disappear? And the 
bank that contained trust deeds and LIC papers is literally, and 
figuratively, swept away?

Who are you, then, in the eyes of the state? How does the state cope 
with this? Does the state have a system in place to deal with a calamity 
such as this, when the entire bureaucratic machinery is paralysed by a 
systemic failure?

Taha
taha at sarai.net
Taha Mehmood is a researcher with the Information Society project with 
Sarai-CSDS

***

- My Mobile Provider Thinks I am a Tsunami Victim / Paul Keller / from 
the Reader List

To: reader-list at sarai.net
From: paul keller<paul at waag.org>

I received my monthly bill from my mobile phone provider, Orange 
Netherlands. Getting a monthly phone bill is nothing special; but one 
which informs you that you are a Tsunami victim, and therefore credited 
with €42.05 for “ extra phone expenses related to the Tsunami,” is 
strange. Especially if you were on a Jet Airways flight from Bombay to 
Delhi, when the Tsunami ravaged the coasts of India and Sri Lanka.

It is no secret that mobile phone providers record the location data a 
mobile phone generates, but under Dutch law, this data cannot be used 
for anything other than invoicing purposes. Moreover, as far as I can 
remember, I did not generate any data at all during the time the Tsunami 
struck, as I replaced my Orange sim-card with an Airtel India branded 
one, and switched back to Orange only on the 11th of January, 2005.

I am not comfortable with my phone company using this (non) data to 
shower its timely benevolence! Not to mention, I was in Delhi during the 
Tsunami which, thanks to its inland location and altitude, is probably 
even less Tsunami-affected than Amsterdam.

It is not difficult to imagine the mechanics behind this situation. The 
public relation geniuses at Orange saw in the Tsunami an opportunity to 
build a personal relationship with their customers. They asked their 
data-mining department for a list of all customers traveling to 
South-Asia when the Tsunami struck. The data miners also procured a CNN 
info-graphic showing the Tsunami affected countries, ran queries based 
on this information, and arrived at a list of 'Tsunami victims'. This 
information went back to the marketing department, and here the amount 
of money available as contingency funds was divided by the number of 
'victims'. The billing department accordingly credited each 'victim' 
with the resulting amount. How should I explain that if I ever wish to 
avail of such a facility, I will buy a travel insurance policy.

I called them and inquired why I was a beneficiary when I was in Delhi 
the whole time, only to be told, “Well that is in the same region, isn't 
it?”

best, Paul

http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/2005-February/005021.html

***

- Distress Definitions: Falling Between the Lines / Clifton Rozario and 
team / from the Reader List

Subject: Distress Definitions: Falling Between the Lines
To: reader-list at sarai.net
From: clifton d' rozario <clifton at altlawforum.org>

 From the 28th of December 2004 onwards, a group of us have been helping 
with relief work in the Tsunami-affected villages of Nagapattinam (Tamil 
Nadu) and Karaikal (Pondicherry).

One of the major problems that can be identified, is the limited scope 
of the 'affected person' definition by the state. The attempt to define 
'affected persons' has been an extremely problematic exercise and there 
is much confusion over who is 'primarily affected', 'secondarily 
affected' and 'not affected'.

While the initial approach was based on the lives lost and property 
damaged, it was later rectified to a certain extent with the recognition 
of petty traders, farmers, landless agricultural labourers, etc, as 
'livelihood affected persons'.
The government in its orders has, until now, adopted a property-owner 
centric policy while addressing livelihood issues in its rehabilitation 
packages, and has only recognized those who own boats and go out to sea, 
as well as those who own and operate small shops in the villages. In 
terms of the farming community that owns agricultural lands that were 
inundated by seawater, surveys have been carried out by the revenue 
departments of various districts to assess the extent of inundation and 
the degree of salination. Post the assessment, a Government Order was 
issued to provide relief to farmers who have lost standing crops.

This categorisation of 'livelihood affected' has meant that in 
formulation of rehabilitation packages, the people of the fishing and 
farming communities that do not own boats, nets or lands, generally 
remain ignored. It has also meant that the government has prioritised 
the needs of the fisher-boat owning community to the detriment of 
landless labourers. In Karaikal, fisher-people have received 60 kgs of 
rice, while landless agricultural labourers have received only 5 kgs. 
This is inexplicable, since both categories of people have lost their 
livelihoods to the Tsunami- the fisherman having lost his boat / nets 
and thus the ability to fish, while the landless agricultural labourer 
has lost his/her work on lands, since these have been salinated. This 
differential treatment has resulted in the landless facing serious food 
crisis.

However, the issue is not one of property / asset ownership alone. A 
majority of the landless are dalits, and most vulnerable to facing 
severe food crisis. What seems like an issue of class in purely economic 
terms, becomes extremely complicated when located in a situation of 
entrenched social hierarchy, where the poorest are also the community 
most vulnerable to violence and discrimination by socially dominant castes.

Caste-based discrimination is exacerbated by the assumption on the part 
of government agencies of communities being 'homogenous'. Fishing 
communities comprise of three main castes- the Meenavar Community (Most 
Backward Caste), dalits (Scheduled Caste) and Pazhankudi Makkal 
(Scheduled Tribes). While the Meenavars own boats, the others are 
engaged in ancillary manual tasks. Therefore while relief is 
'caste-blind', this presumption leads to severe inequities in relief 
disbursement. Even within the fisher-people, dalits have been excluded 
from relief efforts.
Finally, within the 'affected persons' category, district authorities 
seem to have prioritised and counter-posed the interests of those who 
have lost their kith and kin, against people who have lost their 
livelihood, to the detriment of the latter.

Excerpted and adapted from 'Relief and Rehabilitation of 
Tsunami-affected persons in Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry' and 'Exclusion 
of Dalits and Adivasis in the time of Tsunami: The Case for an Inclusive 
Relief and Rehabilitation Policy', by Uvaraj, Niruj, Arvind, Revathi, 
Nitin, Deepu and Clifton.

The full text of the reports can be accessed at:
http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/2005-February/004978.html 
http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/2005-February/004979.html

***

- Story: A museum of objects

SARAI[S]:

A long, long time ago, there was a lake in a city. In the lake was an 
island, and on the island, a village. The city saw many conquerers over 
time. To protect their sacred objects from these conquerers, the 
villagers buried them under the ground. Years passed, people left the 
island and went away to the mainland. In the meanwhile, the city 
expanded. The lake was covered, overlaid with buildings. One day, while 
excavating a foundation for a new building, the buried objects were 
found. The city council wanted the objects for the museum. But the 
people of the land didn't want to give them away. The 'villagers' packed 
them in newspaper and hid them away.

People wanted their own museum. But this was an expensive proposition, and

in any case, there were so many museums already. What was the point of a 
new one? So, they began a project. People wrote histories of the 
objects. They wrote about what the objects meant, and the moment at 
which they had found them. Stories were woven around tales grandparents 
might have told about the objects, if these had been handed to the 
custodians by family elders.

They made a book of these objects: of the stories and of their photos. 
This book is now kept in the 'museum'. The objects are kept in peoples' 
homes. In the museum, you see the book. If you want to feel the object, 
and build a possible future relationship with it, you have to wend your 
way through the streets to the homes.

* as told by Conrado Tostado, visitor to Sarai, 2004


++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

SIDE 02

- Letter to the "Reader"

Dear Anonymous,

A lot of the texts and ideas presented in the /Sarai-txt/ issues are 
based on the work of a number of researchers at Sarai, researchers 
associated with Sarai, students associated with Sarai and the network of 
Sarai independent research fellows, who together, constitute an 
intricate web of knowledge producers.

This network is constituted by diverse sets of practices-making daily 
diaries of notes, posting on lists, maintaining blogs, conversing with 
people in the neighbourhood, locality and the city, meeting different 
people, recording and transcribing interviews, listening to and 
recording sounds of the city, making and circulating broadsheets, 
playing with images, making graphic strips, meeting other researchers in 
own and different cities. This also includes making archival collections 
of footage, posters, stickers, booklets, cassette covers, maps, 
documents, newspaper clippings, photographs and images. The city is 
soaked in and recreated in different ways, through the intersections of 
these practices and experiences, and questions gathered from them.

Our imagination of who a researcher is, deepens through this diversity 
of researchers. The researcher no longer remains someone who has an 
outsider's perspective to the realities she or he begins an engagement 
with. Research becomes a part of everyday living, arising from the lived 
and seeping into it. For instance, among these researchers is a young 
woman who stays at home, busy in her household responsibilities and 
relationships. Every week she sets up tasks for herself. One of the 
notations in her daily diary is, “This week I will make a list of words 
used in the house. If I were to remove the words used most often, in a 
definitional way, for what is allowed in this dwelling, what would the 
house become?” Her research questions emerge from her lived experience, 
and because she is imbricated in it in a specific way, she produces 
questions around her. And as she is part of the diversity of practices 
of the network, she can access and experiment with different expressive 
registers, and forms of circulation.

In the process of making this broadsheet, we become attuned to this 
diversity of practices and nodes.

However, this density is not available to us when we begin to imagine 
the public of the broadsheet-about you, who is reading this publication. 
This is a question about the relationship of the public of the 
broadsheet, with the broadsheet-what does our public do with the 
broadsheet? What is the environment which this broadsheet becomes part 
of, with you? What are the social relations amidst which it finds itself 
once it reaches you?

When we begin thinking about this, we are confronted by a sparseness. We 
have very few terms available to us for thinking about our public. 
'Recipient', 'user', 'end-user', 'viewer', 'reader', 'consumer' of this 
work are some of these terms. With these, our challenge becomes even 
more urgent, because it sharpens the lines between the creator and the 
reader.

How can we think outside the dichotomy of provider and receiver, and so, 
think beyond and question an authorial conception of creativity and a 
passive conception of users. The challenge is also to move away from 
thinking of works as 'property', to thinking about the properties of 
works, which can perhaps be best understood through the category of 
circulation-through the networks through which they inhabit and pass 
through different contexts, inflecting these contexts and being 
inflected by them.

And so we solicit your help, dear anonymous, in thinking through the 
metaphors which can be applied to you, which we can call you by. We 
hope, our dear anon, that through correspondence and conversations with 
us, you will help us deepen and work through these questions.

Looking forward,
The Broadsheet Collective

We would like to acknowledge a number of contexts which have hosted many 
of the questions we are grappling with, and have expressed in this 
letter. Among them are the meeting of Sarai Student Fellows (August 
17-19, 2004), The 'Contested Commons, Trespassing Publics' Conference 
organised by Sarai and the Alternative Law Forum (6-8 January, 2005). We 
are particularly indebted to Peter Jaszi for his provocation to 
critically evolve metaphors for the recipient of a work. An audio file 
of Peter Jaszi's presentation can be accessed 
at:http://www.sarai.net/events/ip_conf/day02_audio/jaszi.mp3

***

- Seeing with Cardboard Days / Log from documentary Cardboard Days, dir. 
Veronica Souto

TC 00 : 08 : 28

A middle-aged man stands in front of a magazine stand, a child clutched 
to his shirtless belly. His smile is friendly. Next to him, a woman with 
a pony tail looks around and chats. Her hand rests gently on the handle 
of her trolley. They look into the quiet distance. Behind them, the 
magazines are colourful, arranged in a square grid.


TC 00 : 08 : 50

A white train waits for passengers. The crowded platform is restless. As 
many trolleys as people. A man indicates the time left before departure. 
He checks all passes. Bodies move along the train, searching for place 
to move into with their trolleys. A patient young man in checked pants 
sits on the train window, watching the proceedings.


TC 00 : 10 : 29

A woman in a white shirt leans comfortably against the door of the 
train. Talks animatedly. Neatly folded papers shift between her hands. A 
man, his body bent towards her, listens closely with pursed lips. The 
city landscape recedes away from them.


*TC 00 : 02 : 09*

It's late evening. A thick stream of people crosses an intersection. 
Office-goers returning home. A man with a black leather paper holder 
under his right arm, walks briskly. A pot-bellied man with a tattoo on 
his arm squeezes through the crowd. Two shoulders graze.


*TC 00 : 02 : 11*

Night has fallen. Few pedestrians. A young woman in high heels walks 
past. The headlights of cars even out all colour. People emerge as 
silhouettes. A man in his late twenties, pushes a trolley/. /The 
trolley. Neatly piled cardboard sheets. A huge black sack on top. A few 
dark bags hang from the handle bars. Two wheels. His white shoes keep 
pace with them. He disappears behind a dark pillar with a white poster. 
Traffic lights blink – red, green. The city halts and moves on.

*TC 00 : 26 : 11*

A woman waiting at a bus stop eyes the stout, brown haired co-traveler 
suspiciously. Moments of waiting turn endless.

*TC 00 : 08 : 09*

A young boy growls at the camera, his body half-hiding a cardboard 
stacked trolley. His tall companion ruffles his hair. A smile is revealed.

*TC 00 : 02 : 24*

A young man stuffs a white sack, as tall as he is. Behind him stands a 
department store, its glass walls encased in iron grills. A blue trash 
can shines in the white light from the store. The gaze of a passer-by in 
a yellow shirt fixes on the steady, lifting motions of the young man. He 
pays no attention. The man in the yellow shirt moves on. A black sticker 
on yellow tiles behind them announces, 'EMERGENCY'.


TC 00 : 31 : 25

The weighing machine calibrates – 16.2, 16.6... The numbers move 
haltingly and then come to a stop. Collections made from the refuse of 
different streets in the city are measured.

Who are these figures who reach the city after sunset, roaming the 
streets after dark, loading their empty trolleys with cardboard from the 
garbage on the street? There must be a word they can all be described 
by. In Buenos Aires, they are called Cartoneros, or Cardboard Collectors 
- people who make their livelihood from the daily waste of the city.

Debates rage in the city: How can this new form of labour be thought of 
with dignity? Who does rubbish belong to in our society? Thrown out of 
homes, is it private property? Left out in the streets, is it the 
property of the city? Can it belong to whoever claims it? Who can take 
rubbish from off the streets?/

*Dias de Carton/Cardboard Days (2003, 51 mins.) dir. Veronica Souto, 
Argentina. Type: Documentary. Language: Spanish


This text was written after a discussion following the screening of the 
film at Sarai. Sarai hosts a film screening every Friday. See: 
_http://www.sarai.net/calendar/calendar.htm_

We wish to thank Breakthrough for providing a copy of the film. 
_www.breakthrough.tv_ <http://www.breakthrough.tv/>

***

- Improbable Imaginings of Improbable Spaces

'Improbable' means 'unlikely'-but also 'marvellous' and 'tall', as in a 
'tall tale'…A tall tale speaks of an imagined and, sometimes, marvellous 
world. Imaginings are points of departure for building something 
marvellous.

For the past two years I have collaborated with Justice Now, a human 
rights organisation, in documenting conversations with women prisoners, 
and publishing them on the Internet. The title of this project refers to 
the improbable, and the monumental.

Traditionally, monuments are associated with the 'monolithic' and 
mono-vocal-a uniform and authoritative representation. But a monument 
might be re-imagined as a 'repository', or archive for information, 
objects and memories, which produce a multi-vocal representation of 
social truths.

ImprobableVoices.net, comissioned for the online exhibition 
'ImprobableMonuments', is the first publication resulting from our 
collaboration. The website is a monument-repository of prisoner's 
descriptions of the experience of incarceration, and their proposals for 
a monument to the end of prisons. As improbable as it may seem, we are 
actively imagining (and working toward building) a world without prisons.

Visits to the prison require adherence to invasive search and 
surveillance procedures. I am registered and searched on entry. I am 
allowed to bring in only a clear plastic bag with an ink pen, 
identification, a blank legal pad and mini-disc recorder. The recorder 
must be approved in advance. The serial number is registered, and the 
device inspected on entry and exit. Only sealed discs are allowed.

After our interviews, the women are subjected to strip search and visual 
cavity searches, that may be performed by male guards. Each of the 
participants, however, has asked to have their full name associated with 
their statements online, despite the possibility of retaliation by the 
authorities. Each participant has a powerful story to tell. And a 
powerful imagination of alternative 'monuments' in a prison-free world.

Beatrice-Smith Dyer's description of a monument-park:

“When you walk in, you would see tall beautiful statues of women-Muslim 
women, Christian women and Jewish women, gay women, young women and old 
women. They would be surrounding a pond, holding out their hands, with 
water flowing out of their finger tips...There would be no wall saying 
who the women were that had passed, but you would know. You could find 
an area to sit in, with trees and swings hanging from the trees.

“Around the area would be a control panel. The control panel could do 
what ever you wanted-you could have soft light or no light, play any 
music you wanted, you could change the ambient temperature. You could go 
down to another area with taller grass and deer. Each area would give 
you enough privacy, so that if you wanted to sit with your lost love and 
just talk to her, you could.”

(Excerpted and adapted from Sharon Daniel's presentation at the 
'Contested Commons/Trespassing Publics' conference organised by 
Sarai-CSDS and the Alternative Law Forum, in collaboration with Public 
Service Broadcasting Trust (6-8 January 2005, New Delhi). An audio file 
of Sharon's presentation can be accessed at: 
_http://www.sarai.net/events/ip_conf/day03_audio/stream08-morning.mp3_

More information about the Improbable Voices project is available at:
www.improbablevoices.net_ <http://www.improbablevoices.net/>

***

- No Thoroughfare / Cybermohalla

It has been raining today and the colours of the evening seem deeper. 
The yellow light of the street lamp is twinkling through the rain drops. 
Clothes left out to dry on the clothesline got drenched in the downpour 
today. Someone is preparing dinner in a cooker, its whistle echoing in 
the street. A plastic bag is flailing, stuck between a railing and the 
wire running over it. It's trying to loosen itself out of their grip. 
The breeze is cool and moist today.


The house in front of me is known as the 'corner house'. There is always 
a cot in front of its main door. A pack of cards, /bidis/, matches, 
/hukka/ and a newspaper are lying on the cot. They are all wet because 
of the rain. But there is no sign of anyone today.


I am the gate on street number 6 in the colony. I'm made of iron, and 
painted black. A board hangs on me, saying 'NO THOROUGHFARE'. The board 
is not heavy, but the words painted on it are a heavy weight that I carry.


The other gate is much better-off than I am. It is at the other end of 
the same lane, and is also painted black. We look alike. But on it hangs 
a different board. That board lists all the houses on this street, and 
directions to get to each of them. The other gate has a big and a small 
entrance through it. The small entrance is always open, and the big 
entrance always shut. This gate looks quite happy. It is I who is 
unfortunate because of this board that hangs on me.


Its just that very few people pass through me, now. I try and cheer 
myself up by watching all the hustle and bustle in the lane in the 
evening. Many people step out, and pass through the street at that time, 
talking over the din of sounds. Children yell and squeal as they run 
after one another, chasing and catching each other. Other children play 
hide and seek. There is the sound of television from different homes.


This board didn't always hang on me. There was an incident in the 
colony, after which it was placed on me. But I'm not very sure about 
what this incident was. Before the board, people would take short cuts 
into the lane through me, pass by with their two-wheelers. Because of 
this board, they don't any more. But then, like I said, I'm not sure if 
this is the only reason. If you have a clue about what the reasons could 
be, please do tell me.


Dakshinpuri lab

cybermohalla at sarai.net

Cybermohalla project of Ankur+Sarai-CSDS

***

The stranger is not the person who comes today and goes tomorrow, but 
the person who comes today and stays tomorrow. He is, so to speak, the 
potential wanderer. Although he has not moved on, he has not quite 
overcome the freedom of coming and going...

George Simmel

http://www.google.co.in/search?q=cache:RmK_xYSsOWgJ:www.blackwellpublishing.com/pdf/women.pdf+simmel%27s+strangers&hl=en 



***

- A Man with His Notes in the City / Bhagwati Prasad, researcher, PPHP, 
Sarai

He would cut a curious figure anywhere-black pants and shirt, white 
jacket cut in the Nehru style but longer, wearing dark glasses even 
inside a small, moderately lit room. But sitting just outside the 
make-up room, with people flitting in and out, he doesn't strike me as 
odd at all.


We are sitting inside a two-room studio where he is shooting for his 
next album. He is a singer, who became an instant hit with his song 
/Janaaza Mera Uthne se Pehle Mehandi Mat Lagana Tum/ in 2002. /“/Video 
albums can't be made without the singer. People buy music albums for the 
singer everywhere-in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, and even 
Kashmir,” he smiles. “These are places where my albums do well. In 
Delhi, they are popular in different places-Uttam Nagar, Shakarpur etc.”


It has been a long journey for this singer, whose voice is an everyday 
companion to bus and truck drivers, among others who make long journeys 
through different landscapes, in their lives. Mohammed Niyaz spent his 
childhood in Sitapur near Lucknow, listening to and singing behind Rafi 
and Talat Mahmood songs. Today, 'sad songs' are his specialty. “When I 
first came to the industry, they said, '/Beta/, don't copy, develop your 
own style'. I don't copy them, but take their support. Everyone 
does-whether in /bhajan/, or in film songs.”


Niyaz came to Delhi at the age of twenty, in search of work. “I worked 
as an accountant for twelve years. Were it not for this job, I would 
never have been a singer,” he muses. But singing was his destiny. “Many 
of my friends ran away from home to come here, but I wanted to take my 
time.” This time came with his father's illness and, being the eldest 
son, responsibility for the family. An avid listener of old film songs, 
he participated in the late evening and Sunday singing competitions 
organised in, and around his locality. “Posters were put up all over. 
The entry fee ranged between Rs. 10 and Rs. 50. I participated again and 
again because I always won a position.”


Then came his big break. “There was a competition on a larger scale than 
the ones I had been participating in, called '/Yaad-e-Rafi'/. I sang 
/Nain Lar Gaye Re/..., and won.” One of the judges was a producer in a 
music company. “He said I should consider joining the industry. There 
was no looking back.” Niyaz's childhood hobby led him to a perchance 
local talent hunt. Today, besides the cassettes he has collected over 
the years, lie his own three albums.


The beginning was rough. He started doing the rounds of companies, gave 
auditions. Initially, he was turned away. “They said there was no market 
for a voice like mine.” Then in 1997 Altaf Raja's '/Tum to Thehre 
Pardesi'/ became a super hit. He recalls, “The industry was a looking 
for singers who could sing sad songs. I went back to one of the small 
companies, called Jai, and said, 'I sing like Altaf'.” His first album 
was created. But he had to wait a year before it was released.

What does Niyaz think about this industry, which he followed as a fan, 
and then made his way into, from an unwanted stranger, to promoting 
himself through a likeness of voice with a known name, to becoming a hit 
himself? His reply is of a person who recognises that destiny is not 
what one person makes alone, and only for himself, “If Janaza Mera...had 
not been hit, no one would have asked about me. People who were with me 
then, today say, 'Niyaz mere saath gata tha', and get a break.”

I take my leave from Niyaz, as he resumes shooting. On the way home, I 
stop at a CD burning shop, where disks are created with the customer's 
selection of songs. It is the marriage season. A boy comes and presents 
the shop owner with a list of 'sad songs', extracts a promise of 
delivery by evening, and leaves. I raise my eye brows quizzically. The 
shopkeeper explains knowingly and in a matter-of-fact manner, “It's a 
gift for the girl who's getting married. Probably his heart-throb.” I 
wonder if singing songs to himself, in quiet moments, this is not 
another singer in the making, and make my way towards home.

Bhagwati Prasad

bhagwati at sarai.net
Bhagwati Prasad is a researcher with the Publics and Practices in the 
History of the Present project in Sarai-CSDS.

***

- Genderchanger (definitions)

A small device or adaptor that changes the 'sex' of cables.
A plug with pins is male and one with holes, female. For a connection, 
the pins fit into the holes. A genderchanger has two sides with holes, 
or two sides with pins. This makes a connection between any port and 
cable a possibility. A genderchanger makes the 'gender' of the plugs 
irrelevant. Genderchangers are most commonly used to extend the length 
of a cable, by connecting two cables together, or simply to change the 
gender of a cable to the gender you need.

http://www.genderchangers.org
http://www.ramelectronics.net/html/gender_changers.html

***

- Why Do You Travel? / Excerpt from talk by Lusia Passerini

It seems to me that in the 1970s, oral history was at the frontier of 
history. Not for any particular merit, in and of itself, but because it 
happened to have a particular function of helping to take a large 
territory of history towards, what might be called, 
micro-history-towards daily life and material culture, towards a 
relationship with anthropology and folklore. Oral history added, through 
'voice', subjectivity to history. Today, filmic sources, including 
moving image sources, are in a similar situation for what concerns 
history-in the sense that they too promise to add something new, to 
enlarge the territory of the historian. What is this 'something new'? 
One may be emotion.

Let me turn to my own experience. I interviewed the working class, for 
the first time, in the mid-1970s. In the 80s, I interviewed women who 
had been feminists in the 1970s. We were looking at who are the subjects 
of social change. The categories that guided us, conceptually and 
politically, were class, gender and age. In the 60s, in the context of a 
political defeat of the radical left, a whole generation was trying to 
transform politics into culture, and social history into cultural history.

What became very clear, slowly, was that something was lacking in this 
complicity. It had a sense of assumed universality. It lacked the 
realization that in fact we were particular beings. When I interviewed 
the workers, or the women, it was assumed that they were the subjects of 
universal history, that they were going to be the ones to change the 
world as a whole…it was west-centric, it was Euro-centric, it was the 
assumption that they were still at the forefront of social change.

Then, in the 90s, I began work on two projects. One, a project in 1999 
with cross-over women, concomitant with warring Kosovo. I did some of 
the interviews in camps in Italy, where Rome Kosovo women were refugees. 
The second, was a project with women migrants from Hungary and Bulgaria, 
to Italy and Holland. During the course of these conversations, I felt 
something had changed in the position between the relationship of the 
self, and the other.
The interviews with the Rome Kosovo women struck me the most. These 
women spoke of their experience in terms completely different from those 
that the existing literature was attributing to them. Existing 
literature assumed that Rome people are nomadic. How did they start 
their narratives? By saying, “My house was burnt, I was thrown out of my 
house... I wish I could go back…” They had a house. They were not 
nomadic at all! These women's narrations were completely different from 
most narrations I had ever heard. They were not narrations with a 
beginning... they were associations – free associations.

When speaking of their reasons for migration, the women said, “Why do 
you call us migrants? Migrants were those who were obliged to go because 
they were poor. We are traveling.” And of course some of them have had 
to work. I mean they are domestic servants, some of them are 
translators... many of them from Bulgaria work as dancers, some of them 
might also be involved in prostitution. But love as a motif for 
migration keeps emerging. They say, “I travel for love... I decided to 
follow my husband,” or, “ I just went for a short time and I fell in 
love and I decided to stay.” In this, the subject is changing. The 
subject presents itself as one for whom love is a primary motive. And 
then, interestingly, they mentioned the complications that state 
regulations and the European Union regulations create against love.

For instance in the Netherlands, when a person who is not from the 
European Union wants to marry somebody who is, they have to produce 
something that proves they are in love. Try to imagine this…it’s not 
easy… I have seen dossiers with letters from the parents saying, “We are 
sure they are in love.” Or, there are love letters. A love letter is an 
incredible document to be used for this… this made me think… the state 
of the Netherlands and the European union as an institutional 
organization, are taking love as a marker of subjectivity. Of course 
they are using it repressively. But this is nonetheless redefining the 
position of the subject.
Excerpted from a talk by Luisa Passerini at the 'History, Memory, 
Identity' workshop organised at Sarai-CSDS (14-16 January 2005)

***

- Traces, Imprints, Flows / Independent Fellows, Sarai

*What is that imprint whose source we cannot trace?*

Writing is an imprint upon the world. For this trace to be 'real', 
however, it cannot remain imprisoned only on the paper, or screen, of 
the writer, to be read by her eyes alone. And so the writer 
publishes-her books travel to far corners of the world, they are 
translated into many tongues, and become, she hopes, part of our common 
imaginations. In this story however, we are never far from the writer.

How then do we think of the act of writing, and putting texts into 
circulation, in spaces (such as the Internet) where we do not know the 
writer through any of the markers we are accustomed to. We do not know 
her name, we do not know if she is a 'she' or a 'he', or masquerading as 
one or the other. We do not which part of the world she comes from, or 
where she is going. What would be that imprint, whose source we cannot 
trace?

(Adapted from the Independent Fellowship research proposal and postings 
of Nitoo Das. Her project is titled 'Hypertextual Poetry: The Poetry of 
MSN Poetry Communities'. river_side1 at hotmail.com)

*What is it that flows create?*

Joshua Gonsalves is nervous. Bombay is a big city and he's never been 
more than twenty miles from Mapsa. Everything is different here-people, 
food, the air. Things will have to be learned quickly. Luckily for him, 
Jonathan Pinto's letter writing formats, available at the corner book 
store, list ways in which a house may be acquired, jobs found, 
relationships with relatives back home, maintained. Marie Fernandez's 
book of recipes is also useful-ingredients easily available back home, 
but hard to find in Bombay's busy markets, can be replaced with local 
substitutes which taste almost as good as the real thing.


People travel-leave home and go to new places. The motivation and 
destination of this journey is not always of their choosing. Transitions 
are eased however, by the knowledges put in circulation by those who 
came before, for those who arrive now, and those arriving tomorrow. And 
by reading advertisements for houses and jobs; singing in church with 
hymnbooks in the local language; reading novels and stories which evoke 
the journey they have just made, strangers to a city enter its 
subjectivity. What is it that flows create?

(Adapted from the Independent Fellowship research proposal and postings 
of Rochelle Pinto. Her project is titled 'Manuel in the City: A 
Semi-Fictionalised Illustrated Book on the Arrival and Absorption of 
Goan Migrants to Mumbai'. rochellepinto at yahoo.com)

*What is lost when flows ebb? *

Mir Baqar Ali, the last famous /dastango/ of India, died in 1928. 
/Dastangoyee/ is an oral story-telling form, popular in central and 
northern regions of South-Asia from the 11^th century onwards. The 
stories revolve around the travels of Amir Hamza, the Prophet's uncle. 
/Dastans/ are recited at street corners and /chowks/, crowded bazaars, 
on the steps of mosques, during fairs and occasions of celebration.

Baqar Ali was a superlative performer. Tall and regal as a king, small 
and frail as an old woman, he held his listeners spell-bound by the 
ability to transform his diminutive frame into the character he was 
playing. This was no ordinary feat, given the 'theater' of his art.

In order that dastangoyee would not be lost, in 1905 Munshi Nawal 
Kishore hired three writer-narrators to compose a multi-volume edition 
of the Dastan of Amir Hamza. The edition was immensely popular, and went 
into several reprints, well into the 20^th century. Dastangoyee also 
influenced other narrative forms: early Hindi and Urdu novels borrowed 
heavily from its narrative structure, dastan conventions influenced Urdu 
theater and the Hindi film industry. From the 1920's onwards however, 
dastangoyee began to wane, and by the mid 1940's it was all but forgotten.

Why did the stories start to fade? Perhaps because the spaces for 
narration changed, perhaps they circulated in so many 'versions'; the 
'original' was forgotten, perhaps sometimes things slip out of 
circulation. What is lost when flows ebb?

(Excerpted and adapted from the Independent Fellowship Research proposal 
of Mahmood UR Farooqui. His project is titled '/Dastangoyee/: The 
Culture of Story Telling in Urdu'. mahmoodfarooqui at yahoo.com)

The projects featured here are from the current cycle of fellowships, 
beginning January 2005.

Information about the Sarai Independent Fellowship programme is 
available at:
http://www.sarai.net/community/fellow.htm

To access research postings subscribe to the reader-list at:
http://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list

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Editorial Collective:
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Smriti Vohra

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Mrityunjay Chatterjee

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