Publications

Sarai Reader 06: Turbulence

If there were ever to be a ‘weather report’ for our times, an audit of the climate in which we have grown accustomed to live, it would use the word ‘turbulence’ often. We inhabit the vortex of storms, and smell sunshine. We are always prepared for rain. Our cities are sites of flood and fire. We live between tremors, power cuts and voltage surges. Agitations emerge and abate on our streets and on the airwaves, as if by accident. Books are burned, blogs are blocked, bourses dance mad tarantulas. We fly with seat belts fastened. Predictions are pronounced and dissembled in seconds. Bets are placed and lost, wagers made and found wanting. Insurance companies invoke acts of God. The more things change, the more they change…
Cybermohalla Broadsheets

“Bade-Bade Sheheron mein Kuchh Namm Baatein (Softer Evocations in Large, Loud Cities)”, is a quarterly publication produced by the Cybermohalla broadsheet editorial team (practitioners from the locality labs at LNJP and Dakshinpuri) at the R&D Lab located in the Ankur office. The broadsheet is published in Hindi. There is a readership in the neighbourhood, as…
Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts

This year, the Reader looks at ‘Acts’ – at instruments of legislation, at things within and outside the law, and at ‘acts’ – as different ways of ‘doing’ things in society and culture. Several essays echo and complement themes that have emerged in earlier readers. Piracy, borders, surveillance, claims to authority and entitlement, the language of expertise, the legal regulation of sexual behaviour and trespasses of various kinds have featured prominently in previous Readers. This collection foregrounds these issues in a way we hope can make a series of coherent but autonomous and interrelated arguments…
Contested Commons / Trespassing Publics

The past three years have seen conflicts over the regulation of information, knowledge and cultural materials increase in intensity and scope. These conflicts have widened to include new geographical spaces, particularly China, India, South Africa and Brazil. Moreover, a range of new problems, including the expansion of intellectual property protection to almost all spheres of our social life, has intensified the problem. It is important to recognize that the nature of the conflict gets configured differently as we move from the United States and Europe to social landscapes marked by sharp inequalities in Asia, Latin America and Africa.
Sarai.txt 1.1: The Object of this Broadsheet

The first issue of the broadsheet is a series of texts and images on the Delhi cityscape.
Sarai Reader 04: Crisis/Media

The process of editing the Reader only confirmed what we felt that the workshop had already set in motion – an unruly but very necessary set of forays into the realm of ‘the unspeakable’. Our contributors were opening out new spaces for dialogue, not only by inaugurating discussion on things that had hitherto been left unsaid, but also in the way that different elements were speaking to each other. Our task was to enable this conversation to interrupt itself, to make all sorts of unruly connections, to foster linkages between disparate truths and conflicting claims to attention…
Sarai Reader 03: Shaping Technologies

Shaping Technologies brings together a host of original writing and images on these and other themes by a collection of writers, theorists, critics, photographers, philosophers, engineers, activists, artists, media practitioners and programmers from all over the world. It also excavates and connects little known histories with our present reality, finding, for instance, in Rabindranath Tagore’s account of being airborne in 1934, an oblique way of reflecting on the consequences of aerial bombardment, the dehumanising mindset that implodes when the pious do battle, and the prospects of a war that threatens to break over Iraq, even as this book goes to press…
Cybermohalla Book Box

The Cybermohalla Book Box contains a series of reflections by practitioners on their process of joining and being in the Cybermohalla labs, which were shared with over 200 people in a public gathering on the occasion of the launch of the Book Box (Baraat Ghar, Near Kali Building, Dakshinpuri, Delhi, 8th October, 2003).
Galiyon Se / By Lanes
Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of Everyday Life

This year’s Sarai Reader brings together a range of critical thinking on urban life and the contemporary, marked by spreading media cultures, new social conflict and globalisation. Scholars, media practitioners, critics and activists use a flow of images, memories and hidden realities to create a fascinating array of original interventions in thinking about cities today. In the context of India, where a large part of this reader has been edited, this is significant, given the frugality of writing on city life in this part of the world…