Wired.com runs a short article/photo essay about what is probably one of the world’s last hand-lettered newspapers: The Musalman, a daily Muslim newpaper published in Chennai. Each day four local calligraphers hand-letter the Urdu stories which are then printed in 20.000 copies on a 60-year-old offset printer.
The Musalman is possibly the last handwritten newspaper in the world. Four professional calligraphers spend three hours on each page every single day to put out this daily paper.
While it’s a Muslim newspaper, it’s also a beacon of liberalism in South Asia, employing both women and non-Muslims. Two of the four katibs (calligraphers) are women and the chief reporter is Hindu. Indian royalty and poets often visit the paper to offer content and accolades.
the german weblog netzpolitik has a 20 minute interview with the ALF’s Lawrence Liang. the interview was taken in Dubrovnik during the iSummit07 and gives a good overview over Lawrence’s work (for those who are not familiar with it)
there are two articles about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) in the spring 2007 issue of بدون/bidoun. the second one (’let them eat laptops’ (p72ff.) - not available online) is a relatively serious email discussion about the merits of the project between a couple of academics. the other article ‘glory‘ by kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina) takes the OPLC project as a starting point for a fascinating exploration into how technology is appropriated. it’s one of the best texts i have read in a long time and starts like this:
I was twelve years old, in a small public school in Nakuru. One day, the whole school was called out of class. Some very blond and very serious people from Sweden had arrived. We were led to the round patch of grass next to the parade ground in front of the school, where the flag was. Next to the flag were two giant drums of cow shit and metal pipes and other unfamiliar accessories. We stood around, heard some burping sounds, and behold, there was light.
This is biogas, the Swedes told us. A fecal matyr. It looks like shit-it is shit-but it has given up its gas for you. With this new fuel you can light your bulbs and cook your food. You will become balanced dieted; if you are industrious perhaps you can run a small biogaspowered posho mill and engage in incomegenerating activities.
We went back to class. Very excited. Heretofore our teachers had threatened us with straightforward visions of failure. Boys would end up shining shoes; girls would end up pregnant.
Now there was a worse thing to be: a user of biogas.
… and ends with this:
There are few useful “development models” for genuinely selfstarting people. I am sure the One Laptop per Child initiative will bring glory to its architects. The IMF will smile. Mr Negroponte will win a prize or two or ten. There will be key successes in Rwanda; in a village in Cambodia; in a small, groundbreaking initiative in Palestine, where Israeli children and Palestinian children will come together to play minesweeper. There will be many laptops in small, perfect, NGO-funded schools for AIDS orphans in Nairobi, and many earnest expatriates working in Sudan will swear by them.
And there will be many laptops in the homes of homeschooling, goattending parents in North Dakota who wear hemp (another wonderproduct for the developing world). They will fall in love with the idea of this frugal, noble laptop, available for a mere $100. Me, I would love to buy one. I would carry it with me on trips to remote Kenyan places, where I seek to find myself and live a simpler, earthier life, for two weeks a year.
in-between these two parts it covers all of the subjects in the title of this post and many more. my favorite part is probably the bit about Kenyan cellphone culture.
A guy called Njoroge has a business in Nairobi’s industrial area called “Lord of the Ringtones.” They digitalize and sell ringtones, 220,000 of them a month. Cellphones are the biggest business in Kenya.
And they are transforming culture, even as they spawn new markets. In Nairobi, a student paper caters to kids from across the city’s high schools; submissions are sent in by text message, with articles written in textesewords broken into their smallest possible lucid components. Every few months or so, rumors circulate, breaking some code or other and giving free airtime or texts. Some people have learned to communicate for free with their regular clients or family by coding their ringing: one ring, I am on my way; two rings, I have picked up the kids; three rings, I love you.
Sarai independent fellow Zubin Pastakiais talking pictures of old-style bombay cinema halls, and has started posting them to his blog:
I am currently photographing cinema halls in Bombay, India, the city in which I live. Here, we still have a mix of older, single-screen halls, and modern multiplexes. I am fascinated by the cinema hall - from its built architecture and physical surfaces to the people that come to watch films and the people that work there. The project seeks to photographically explore the cultural experience of different types of cinema halls in Bombay city.
there are some really beautifully shots on the blog already and he promises that there are much more to come. i really like the ones showing projectionists next to those ancient projectors so common in indian cinema halls. i took some very similar shots two years ago in bangalore.
During lat week of March 2007. a meeting was held in Salvador, Bahia. DesCentro members have met in order to make a firm base (functional as well as legislative) on further development of this network.
DesCentro is de-centralized organizational node of collaborative actions, inserted in broader context of Brazilian media activism. This context is formed by group of organizations, researchers, activists, teachers, hackers and artists coming from all regions of the country. More details on DesCentro.
Main DesCentro’s goal is to develop the methodological structural and approach to optimize network that has been working together for more than five years, avoiding the downsides of common institutionalization. Even the way DesCentro was established is deep criticism to the well-known NGO “show business”. Another situation DesCentro intends to provide is ways for people to carry out independent research and practice and still earn for their living, respecting the principles of collaboration, de-centralization, diversity and freedom.
History of DesCentro has been a collective work of different groups and collectives. Through meetings and online contacts good conections were established inside Brazil as well as in the world, mainly India and Netherlands. Members took part in events such as Media Tactica Brasil, Next5Minutes4 in Amsterdam, Alternative Law Forum and Submidialogia.
In October 2005. Submidialogia happened in Campinas, Brazil. A group formed by members of Metareciclagem, Tactical Media and Submídia emerged and decided to work together within the perspective of developing an organizing node for the Brazilian critical media networks, in to order to promote the development of tactical media exchange and projects.
when i first flew to beirut in 2005, i was seated next to a Microsoft representative who then mentioned that Microsoft could not do business in syria, ‘because it is on the shit-list‘ (guess her refers to John Bolton’s extended axis of evil). Of course that does not mean that no one is using Microsoft products in Syria (in fact there are shit-loads of computer shops and internet cafes in Damascus if one considers that computers and internet have only been legalized in 2000). In fact you can buy the latest Microsoft products almost anywhere, the only thing that differentiates them from Microsoft products in other countries are the installation instructions:
Install Windows Vista Ultimate Without Entering a Serial Number. Chose The Option “windows vista ultimate”
after completing the installation, go to your cd drive and open the folder “crack” from there, and run the application “crack.exe” and wait until the activation process complete and you’ll se a message says: the process is completed successfully, and requesting a system restart.
after restarting system you will receive a pop message says” activation done successfully now close the message windows and start windows.
and that’s all, now you can enjoy the most complete edition of windows with no time limits, and can be updated directly from Microsoft.com
came across this installation in front of a small internet cafe/phone shop in the Psiri in the center of Athens yesterday:
when i took pictures of it a guy the indian shopkeeper of a mini market across the street came out of his shop and asked me why i was taking pictures of this ‘ugly piece of crap’. before i could even answer him the owner of the internet cafe cam out and responded to him that this was not ‘creativity’ not crap, to which i agreed. during the resulting conversation with Rana (the owner) which for some reason centered on the fact that he liked amsterdam a lot (no not because of the legal dope or any of the usual reasons people have for liking amsterdam, but because he had perceived amsterdam as a place without the racism he encounters in athens, which given the xenophobic tendencies in holland in the last couple of years i found quite remarkable) he mentioned that he was a bengali from Kolkatta. this sparked another round of insults from the mini market shop keeper, who insisted that Rana was in fact not a bengali but from Bangladesh adding extra flavor to the earlier complaint about racism in Greece.
had the chance to play with a beta 2 unit of the low cost laptops from the One Laptop Per Child Project at the Creative Commons Conference that i was attending in Athens yesterday.
these beautifully engineered machines are quite impressive given their $140 dollar price tag. got a little bit confused by the completely non standard user interface, but the people involved with the project claimed that kids seem to get it more or less right away.
however, the coolest thing about the laptops is the eBook mode, which is accessed by flipping the high resolution screen around. apparently the laptops do not consume any power at all when displaying text in eBook mode, and only need a tiny amount of power when flipping pages. (find that kind of hard to believe, but the screen does not have a backlight so i also do not really see why they should consume power in the first place).
In the first week of December 2006 Waag Society’s Locative Media section organised a workshop at Sarai in Delhi, India. During two days, two groups of people tried to work out their own locative media concepts - not only on paper, but also in the field. Using a mobile phone and GPS they tracked their routes and annotated this with video footage, photos and audio material. The following video was produced by Waag Society in January 2007 and documents parts of the workshop (the walks):
photographs taken during the workshop are available here and here. more detailed writings from the workshop participants can be found here (group 1) and here (group 2)
A Satiric blog on the 14 march/february group posted a new game, The battle of the Sarai - The final battle, a free PC game (just one level), where you have to “liberate” the Sarai from the gang of 14.
The Sarai is the headquarters of the Prime Minister, situated in downtown Beirut.
For some background on what is happening in Lebanon, read this recent article in The Nation magazine (US), or Robert Fisk’s article on the revolution-in-the-making, or this letter from Beirut.
