Cybermohalla
Mohalla in Hindi and Urdu means neighbourhood, and New Delhi's Sarai Media Lab's Cybermohalla project reflects this word. It takes the alleys and corners, its sense of relatedness and concreteness, as a means for talking about one's place in the city, and in cyberspace.
Sarai is a partner, with Ankur, an NGO experimenting for the last two decades with alternatives in education, in running the Compughar. Compughar, started in May 2001, is a small media lab running on free software and low-cost media equipment. In a working-class settlement constantly threatened by dislocation, LNJP Basti, the lab is in the heart of Delhi, though the area is mainly invisible to the majority of the city dwellers.
Through work at the Compughar, young people mainly aged 15 - 20, are creating and expressing their observations and reflections in words and images. To help this a simple software solution for web page multimedia authoring is being developed by Sarai. This software is designed to run with the Free operating system GNU/Linux, is made for use in the Hindi language and is designed to be easy to use and suitable for low specification hardware.
LH