[Reader-list] Sam Miller on Sarai

[Kshmendra Kaul]

"Many of these discussions are suffused with post-modern jargon, but usually they are worth the effort."


--- On Mon, 8/10/09, Naeem Mohaiemen <naeem.mohaiemen at gmail.com> wrote:


From: Naeem Mohaiemen <naeem.mohaiemen at gmail.com>
Subject: [Reader-list] Sam Miller on Sarai
To: "sarai list" <reader-list at sarai.net>
Date: Monday, August 10, 2009, 9:18 PM


On Sarai, excerpt from Sam Miller's book...

In the basement of a modern building at the foot of the Ridge, ten
minutes from the site of Ludlow Castle, are the offices of an
organisation that calls itself ‘Sarai’. Anyone who asks the simple
question ‘What is Sarai?’ may not get such a simple answer. It is a
place, but it also an idea. Sarai is Delhi at its most modern, its
most virtual. It exists in a series of rooms in Civil Lines, but it
also orbits in cyber-space.  According to its own publicity
literature, Sarai ‘encompasses an inter-disciplinary research
programme, a platform for critical reflection, a screening space, a
convivial context for online and offline conversations and a media
lab’. I have known about Sarai for several years, as an unashamed
lurker on its e-mail groups – receiving regular updates on a eclectic
range of subjects, often about Delhi, ranging from ‘the Culture of
Telephone Booths’, through ‘Society and the Soap Factory to ‘Locating
Sexuality through the eyes of Afghan and Burmese Refugee Women in
Delhi’. Many of these discussions are suffused with post-modern
jargon, but usually they are worth the effort.

Sarai – the non-virtual part of it – consists of three rooms: a
private inner sanctum where individuals have their own workstations; a
glass-walled public access computer area (the media lab), and a large
meeting room with a café. No-one looked up when I walked in and sat
down, eavesdropping. There was a three-way discussion about French
philosophers (Foucault and de Certeau), a young man was retying his
pony tail as he watched cricket on a wall-mounted TV (not quakeproof –
a potentially lethal missile, I decided), and a young woman was
sitting at a table staring at her coffee mug as if it were an object
of worship. I interrupted her to ask for help getting access to the
Sarai online archive (I needed to find out more about Ludlow Castle).
She gave me a split-second look of exasperation, before getting to her
feet and handing me over to the resident computer expert. He took me
into the media lab (with only one of the eight computers free), sat me
down in front of a terminal and began logging me in. ‘Username: guest.
Password: guest. You do know Linux and Mozilla Firefox[1], don’t you?’
‘Er, yes - a little.’ I was lying. I suppose I was rather proud of
myself for having heard of them, and too embarrassed to admit that I
hadn’t ever used them. I knew that they were the main software
competition to Microsoft, and that they were, in some way that I
didn’t quite understand, alternative, democratic and trendy. He’d put
me on to a local area network where I could now access the archive. I
entered ‘Ludlow Castle Delhi’ in the search box, and the entire screen
went white. So did I. My usual solution, ‘Ctrl-Alt-Del’, had no
effect, I panicked. And looking surreptitiously around, knowing I was
doing something very naughty, I pressed my finger down hard on the
on/off key. With a tell-tale squeak the screen went blank. I looked
around again; no-one was staring with disdain in my direction. I’d
escaped detection, and thirty seconds later I turned the computer on
again, to a profusion of messages about how sinful I’d been to turn it
off improperly.

[1] Mozilla Firefox – Netscape’s successor and the main rival to
Explorer as an Internet browser. A firefox is a red panda still found
in India. Mozilla is a contraction of Mosaic Killer (Mosaic was the
first widely used Internet browser). Linux is an open-source operating
system, invented by Linus Thorvalds, a rival to MS Windows and Apple’s
Mac OS.
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