Publications
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No Apologies for the Interruption
Power creates rules, makes many implements to reign in possibilities and the impulses to create. But force of life cannot be contained; it bursts through anyway. Energy travels from body to body; each environment germinates countless more. It is of such questions, imaginations and collisions that No Apologies for the Interruption is an expression.
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Sarai Reader 08: Fear
Modernity’s great promise – the freedom from fear, now lies in ruins. One can argue that this vision was always compromised – modernity (especially in the form that emerged in the West, under Capitalism) always hid its own fears, and hid from its own fears – the fear of epidemics, of urban panic, of the homeless multitude and of criminal activity. This led to a drive for transparency: for separating the civic from the criminal, the civilised and the barbaric peoples, the human from the non human, life from the machine. With the advent of the mass slaughters of the 20th century, where more died than ever in recorded human history, this promise lay shattered. Today, the drive for transparency has been rendered doubly difficult, with new mobile populations, new networks, new previously unimagined terrors. Sovereignty seems an antiquated slogan of the past, and in the wake of the financial shocks of 2008,
there seems to be some substance in the contention that Western capitalism has entered a phase of possibly long term decline… -
Trickster City
Trickster City is an extraordinary composite of writings on the city of Delhi. They were written over a period of two years by a group of twenty young people who live in different places in the city of Delhi, and who have, over the last several years, sustained among themselves and with others around them, a relationship of writing and conversing about the city.
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Tinker.Solder.Tap
The protagonists of Tinker.Solder.Tap bring alive the ways in which the relationship between life and the media has been re-scripted in the various neighbourhoods of our cities. The story begins in the mid-80s, when a man returns home with an object called a VCR. The chain of effects that follows transforms irreversibly the social life of the neighbourhood and its reverberations can be felt all over the world…
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Raj Comics for the Hard Headed
After 25 years of producing an entire galaxy of superheroes, Raj Comics is the largest comic book publishing house in India. They have published more than 5000 titles and are home to more than 20 characters. But, what is the world of Raj Comics? Who is the Raj Comics superhero? Where does he operate? What does he protect? And what does he protect it from? What role does the trinity of Law, Justice and Authority have to play in these comics? Surrounded by all these questions, a man rides in the city, certain that something has gone horribly wrong and needs to be saved. Certain that this time it is his turn to be the saviour.
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Working Questions: Independent Research and Interdisciplinary Practice
For the last almost eight years [2000-08], Sarai, as part of its commitment towards the enrichment of the public life of intellectual activity in India, has consistently supported independent research projects and inter-disciplinary practice initiatives all over the country. These projects, undertaken by a diverse body of researchers and practitioners in English and Hindi, constitute a growing body of work that has emerged under the aegis of the Sarai-CSDS programme of fellowships for independent researchers and practitioners. Till date, this has translated into more than three hundred foundational grants to independent research and practice projects located in more than twenty cities across India. These projects are best seen, not as a set of finished undertakings, but as an array of working questions…
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Sarai Reader 07: Frontiers
Frontiers considers limits, edges, borders and margins of all kinds as the sites for declarations, occasions for conversation, arguments, debates, recounting and reflection. Our book suggests that you consider the frontier as the skin of our time and our world, and we invite you to get under the skin of contemporary experience in order to generate a series of crucial (and frequently unsettling) narrative and analytical possibilities. For us, the frontier is a threshold waiting to be crossed, a space rife with the seductive aura of transgression…
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Sarai.txt 3.3: Horizon of Scanning
Horizon of Scanning juxtaposes found materials, thoughts and reflections on the body, to radio waves, to television screens, the coming of street lighting, to acts of reading – scanning operates as a metaphor for control, diagnosis and a recombinant frame (when you search, you scan, and so open up possibilities of newer interconnections). The word travels between different disciplines and practices (from medicine to literature to surveillance to everyday acts).
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FLOSS is Not Just Good for Teeth
Are you a non-nerd, a human being who happens to use computers without living inside them? Does that make you curious to find out what the buzz regarding open source and free software is all about? What’s in it for you? Does it work? Is it fun and easy to use? How is it made and who makes it? And how ‘free’ or ‘open’ is it, really? Have you looked long and hard for answers to questions like these in plain English? If that’s the case, ‘FLOSS is not just good for teeth’ could be just what you are looking for.
