Sarai Newsletter 03

[newsletter-admin at sarai.net]

Dear Friends

Let me first extend a warm welcome to all the new members who have 
subscribed to the Sarai newsletter. I also thank all those who 
forwarded the newsletter to these friends and to those who wrote back 
appreciating the list.

The Sarai newsletter list has now close to 800 members. For this 
reason, and also because primarily it has been envisaged as an 
informative list about Sarai, we do not post responses on the list. 
Please address any responses to the newsletter to saumya at sarai.net or 
dak at sarai.net. If you wish to involve a wider audience, please 
subscribe to the Reader-list, which is a discussion list that grew out 
of the responses to the Sarai Reader 01: The Public Domain. 
(http://www.sarai.net/journal/reader1.htm). The Reader list has grown 
into a lively community of programmers, web designers, artists, 
academics and media practitioners, and anybody is free to post on any 
issue related to communication and media  technologies and urban 
space. To subscribe, please go to the url  
http://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list, or mail 
monica at sarai.net.


Workshop Report

Sarai was a lively space the whole of the month of May. The 
Cybermohalla workshop - a collaboration between Sarai and Ankur, 
Society for Alternatives in Education -  was attended by ten children 
between 14 \15 years,  and what a time we all had. The adeptness with 
which the children took to the  computer, the camera, the audio 
recorder was truly amazing. The work generated by the workshop will 
soon be uploaded on to the Sarai website. The project is now on at the 
Ankur Centre at the Basti Vikas Kendra, J.P. Colony, Turkman Gate, New 
Delhi.  


Hindi Sarai

For those of you who are comfortable in Hindi, please go to the url 
http://www.sarai.net/hindiweb/index.htm for the Hindi Sarai site. You 
can also go to the Hindi Sarai by clicking on 'Sarai' written in 
Devnagari script on the Sarai homepage. 
Hindi Sarai is an offshoot of the Language and the New Media project 
at Sarai, and is still under the process of development.  An  
independent Sarai Hindi site is on the cards. In its current 
structure, apart from two introductory articles (one inhouse, the 
other by an observer, published in a newspaper), the Hindi Sarai Home 
page carries a small statement of intent, facility for font(Shusha) 
download, and links to its three constituent segments: Sancharkosh, 
Websadhan and Muktsoftware. 

The first is a lexical resource, of new media and humanities terms, to 
be developed by contributions from the contributions from the public 
domain. We have made a start with a list of 200 words, and in future, 
we plan to make it interactive by allowing for space for language 
users to write in the words, meanings and quarrel over these. A 
discussion list will also be initiated. 
The Sancharkosh carries an article by Aditya Nigam on problems faced 
by Hindi. The Websadhan page provides linkages to some important Hindi 
sites and portals - literary and journalistic - some newspapers and 
lexical resources. The Mukta software page will carry 
documents/articles and manuals on free software that Sarai will 
develop.
The page on the popular culture is much more substantial: a couple of 
articles by Sanjeev Kumar, Tarun Bharatiya's  poems on Shillong, some 
couplets of Firaq Gorakhpuri with translations by Prof. Noorul Hasan, 
and a note on the Hindi public sphere by Ravikant. Sanjeev Kumar's 
memoir on the Vaishali Cinema Hall in Patna is hilarious. And the 
poems by Bharatiya convey a different sense of 'touristy' Shillong. 
We could be glad to receive your comments, criticisms, suggestions and 
contributions for any of the themes/pages. Please mail your responses 
to ravikant at sarai.net


Event at Sarai
A Discussion Meeting on Information Technologies, Regulation and Civil 
Liberties                                                    June 15 
(Friday) , 2001, 4:00 pm
Sarai will host an introductory discussion meeting to examine the 
implications legislation on new communication technologies
As you may be aware, in India legislation such as the Information 
Technology (IT) Act 2000 and other extraordinary legal measures that 
have been implemented recently to restrict access and freedom on the 
internet. The draft Communications and Convergence Bill (2001) which 
has received the assent of the Group of Ministers (GoM) promises to 
further attack  freedom of expression. Concurrent with this are plans 
to create massive citizen databases and identification mechanisms to 
erode privacy and increase surveillance. 
We hope that this meeting can initiate a regular process of 
interaction and dialogue between people working in civil liberties and 
democratic rights related issues, information technology and new media 
practice and research. 

Films at Sarai
Sarai  starts a weekly film series from the 22nd  of June, 2001. The 
films will be screened every Friday at 4:30 pm. We start with a series 
of Japanese films and the first two titles are: 
Akira 1987, (animation, directed by Kutushiro Otomo)and I Live in 
Fear, 1955, (directed by Akira Kurosawa)

Akira 
Friday, 22nd June 2001, 4:30 pm, Seminar Room, CSDS, Delhi - 54
Akira is a brilliantly drawn tale of impending apocalypse set in 2030 
Tokyo. A brilliant flash envelops the city eleven years after World 
War III. Teenage gangs, psychic children with devastating powers, 
government agents and underground resistance groups course through the 
city's dilapidated visceral landscape. Compared by critics to classic 
masterpieces such as Bladerunner, Clockwork Orange and Mad Max, this 
anime or animated film derives from comic artist Otomo's six volume 
cartoon strip epic or manga, a widely translated work which won many 
awards, spawned video games and merchandise ranging from t-shirts to 
lunch boxes and toys. Otomo's current work is the six part The Legend 
of Mother Sarah (with Nagayasu Takumi ) and Hunchback (with Alexandro 
Jodorowsky) for comics and Roujin Z and Memories as film director. 

I Live in Fear
Friday, 29th June, 2001, 4:30 pm, Seminar Room, CSDS, Delhi - 54
Toshiro Mifune, almost unrecognizable under layers of make-up, stars 
as a graying patriarch whose fear of nuclear annihilation leads him to 
make plans to move his large family from Tokyo to a farm in Brazil. 
Thinking his fears irrational, and expressing grave concern over the 
dispensation of his estate, they take him to court and, like a good 
judge, Kurosawa lets both sides exhaust themselves without drawing a 
premature judgement. Fear offers a hugely compelling glimpse at the 
post-war Japanese mindset, and at the Cold War mindset in general.


Thanks


Saumya 
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