Document Actions
Urja Ghar
"Urja Ghars" are locality media labs which Oxfam and Gujarat based Sewa Mandir are in the process of setting up in various locations (villages) in Gujarat. Spaces for writing and reflection about locality and everyday life, these labs come, chronologically, post the Gujarat riots (2002). The challenge of being sites of production and circulation of knowledge is therefore uniquely inflected in the Urja Ghars by the specificity of the marked identity-based conflict within which they nest.
Lakhmi Chand Kohli, Yashoda Singh and Prabhat Jha from Cybermohalla have been involved as resource persons in this project. Their role in this has been of interacting with two sets of groups -
1. With the interlocutors of the Urja Ghar - those who will initiate the process of the setting up of these labs (24 to 40 years old), and,
2. The practitioners at the labs - 12 to 22 years old. These are in two villages in Gujarat.
The first phase of the interaction was through workshops with the interlocutors of the Urja Ghar project. This involved sharing certain experiences and practices from the CM experience with the group. In the two months following that, 'Urja Ghars' were set up in different parts of Gujarat by Sewa Mandir, and CM practitioners have now been interacting with practitioners there. Practitioners from Urja Ghar also visited the Cybermohalla Labs in Delhi.
This has opened up a dialogue with a new set of questions and provocations for the CM interlocutors at Urja Ghar. One among them is, how to bring a publicness to the processes at the Urja Ghar labs. That is, how to leave an imprint of the labs in the locality? A "Shared Space" writing practice has now been conceptualised which seeks to bring the quotidian into discussion through inscription of everyday questions onto publicly visible and accessible places (eg selected poles, walls, shutters of shops etc).
After their third workshop at the Urja Ghar (March 2005) Prabhat Jha, Lakhmi Chand Kohli and Yashoda Singh wrote:
Lakhmi Chand Kohli, Yashoda Singh and Prabhat Jha from Cybermohalla have been involved as resource persons in this project. Their role in this has been of interacting with two sets of groups -
1. With the interlocutors of the Urja Ghar - those who will initiate the process of the setting up of these labs (24 to 40 years old), and,
2. The practitioners at the labs - 12 to 22 years old. These are in two villages in Gujarat.
The first phase of the interaction was through workshops with the interlocutors of the Urja Ghar project. This involved sharing certain experiences and practices from the CM experience with the group. In the two months following that, 'Urja Ghars' were set up in different parts of Gujarat by Sewa Mandir, and CM practitioners have now been interacting with practitioners there. Practitioners from Urja Ghar also visited the Cybermohalla Labs in Delhi.
This has opened up a dialogue with a new set of questions and provocations for the CM interlocutors at Urja Ghar. One among them is, how to bring a publicness to the processes at the Urja Ghar labs. That is, how to leave an imprint of the labs in the locality? A "Shared Space" writing practice has now been conceptualised which seeks to bring the quotidian into discussion through inscription of everyday questions onto publicly visible and accessible places (eg selected poles, walls, shutters of shops etc).
Lambariya and Karawara are two villages in Gujarat. There is a lab in each, where young people meet to discuss and write about their locality. They are just setting up and have invited us to share our practices and questions with them. When we went to the lbas in these villages a third time, we encountered a question, "We meet at the lab everyday and write. But what we write tends to remain within the four walls of the lab. How can we bring it into circulation? How can we leave an imprint in the locality?"
And so, we walked through both the localities, searching for surfaces. We were a motley group - young people from the labs, the three of us, and a local painter.
Our first surface was a door of a long-abandoned house, where an old woman once lived. It's a door that people used to pass by, without pausing. We painted, “What is the daily routine of a woman? I know someone who wakes up at 4:30 in the morning. At 5:00 she fills water from the well and washes the utensils...”. Next morning many young women gathered around the door, reading blue words on the bright pink door. The door knocked and called them to itself.
We next found a wall beside the raised platform where village elders meet to discuss different concerns of the village. Many people congregate here, sometimes to discuss grave matters, and at other times to share a celebration. We wrote, "Sometimes time is light, like a feather, and sometimes it is heavy. What is the significance of two minutes in your life? Of 15 minutes? Of an hour? Of a day? Of a month? Of 10 years? Of 25 years? 50 years? 80 years?"
On a third wall we sent out another invitation, "Tell us, is your face one of these? A face bent in concentration, sipping tea from a glass in a tea stall. A face sleeping in the shade of a wall, away from the scorching sun. A face calling out to children to buy sweets from him, roaming the streets in the evening. A face looking at a phone, in some confusion, at the STD booth. A face..."
And so, we walked through both the localities, searching for surfaces. We were a motley group - young people from the labs, the three of us, and a local painter.
Our first surface was a door of a long-abandoned house, where an old woman once lived. It's a door that people used to pass by, without pausing. We painted, “What is the daily routine of a woman? I know someone who wakes up at 4:30 in the morning. At 5:00 she fills water from the well and washes the utensils...”. Next morning many young women gathered around the door, reading blue words on the bright pink door. The door knocked and called them to itself.
We next found a wall beside the raised platform where village elders meet to discuss different concerns of the village. Many people congregate here, sometimes to discuss grave matters, and at other times to share a celebration. We wrote, "Sometimes time is light, like a feather, and sometimes it is heavy. What is the significance of two minutes in your life? Of 15 minutes? Of an hour? Of a day? Of a month? Of 10 years? Of 25 years? 50 years? 80 years?"
On a third wall we sent out another invitation, "Tell us, is your face one of these? A face bent in concentration, sipping tea from a glass in a tea stall. A face sleeping in the shade of a wall, away from the scorching sun. A face calling out to children to buy sweets from him, roaming the streets in the evening. A face looking at a phone, in some confusion, at the STD booth. A face..."