Three volunteers from France, who have been friends to the Project for two years, came back to run a project with community children, through which they created a blog about the ‘basti’. Participants went through a long and trying selection process. Only those found committed and clear about the contribution they expected to make were invited to join the 12 day workshop. Students were taught the basics of digital photography, interviewing techniques, researching and writing an article in collaboration with the computer and language experts of the school.
The blog was launched on the 5th of September and is available for comment in Hindi and in English at this address: http://nizamuddinbastiblog.freeflux.net
While creating a ‘basti’ blog was the idea of the volunteers, it was taken up with a lot of enthusiasm by Kamini who was very impressed by the impact that a blog could make when it focussed on an issue that needed to be discussed at the community level. Her reference was the Nanglamachi movement against inhumane demolitions and the blog that popularised the issue and gained the protestors a lot of support. Shariq, the community worker at Hope who has had a great deal of experience working with the ‘basti’ youth on various issues of conscientization, as well as with media, was also very excited with the potential for the blog being a medium of expression for the ‘basti’ at large. The concerns were about the fact that relatively speaking very few people in the ‘basti’ are computer literate. The project went ahead inspite of this concern because there was a dependable hope that this situation had the potential to change. The students of the school would all contribute and the blog would be introduced in cybercafes across the ‘basti’ and candle-to-candle the word and activity on the blog would spread.
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