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…

These books in the Book Box, which are in different colours, are perhaps easy to look at and to read. But we know how much effort has gone into producing them. There has been a careful process of selection of texts, so that you may like them. When we write, we don’t really know what the beginning of the text will be, or how the text will end, or what we will really be writing about. When we do arrive at a beginning, we not only have to write the text but also pay attention to where to sit and write it, what time of the day we should chose, pay attention to the sounds around us, from where the light falls, and how we should express in words what we want to communicate. Sometimes everyday incidents in buses or on the road get written so interestingly that even the mundane becomes intriguing and compels us to think…

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).

“The hottest place in hell is reserved for those who tried to stay neutral in times of crisis…” – The Inferno, Dante Alighieri   [clear]

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…

The Sarai Reader (which is the first of what we hope will be more such collections) can be seen both as a navigation log of actual voyages and a map for possible journeys into a real and imagined territory that we have provisionally called the “Public Domain”. This republic without territory is a sovereign entity that comes into being whenever people gather and begin to communicate, using whatever means that they have at hand, beyond the range of the telescope of the merchant, and outside the viewing platform of the microscope of the censor…