2008.02.28 Dharavi’s just a click away
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Rahul Srivastava, Mumbai Mirror, Feb 28, 2008
A
big hit at the International film festival in Goa last year was the
Portuguese film Dotcom. An unusual ode to village life, the film
describes the accidental ways in which the digital world connects us to
each other.
A remote village in Portugal starts its own
website thanks to the efforts of an engineer who has recently moved
there. He soon discovers that the seven-hundred-year-old village shares
its name with a relatively new Spanish multi-national company. The
company, of course, shows no patience with history and wants to stamp
out the unknown village’s fragile web identity. The film is all about
how the villagers — as gloriously divided and fragmented as any human
habitat can possibly be — manage to get the better of the company, the
government and the many vested interests that swarm around its newly
found global visibility.
We
may have eaten food prepared in Dharavi, bought stuff made there
without even knowing it but now there is a way of getting to know it
better
In the end, the village gets some improved infrastructure while
managing to defend its own idiosyncratic way of life. It does this by
rejecting some
developmental ambitions that the government wants implemented, more for its own glory than for the benefit of the villagers.
Of
course, that’s a feel-good movie. All of us, Bollywood jaded souls,
know too well that such happy endings are really a contrast to real
life. Only cinematic villages manage to defeat grand empires in cricket
matches. Sometimes, comic-book habitats manage to squash mighty
empires, but, with the help of a healthy dose of magic potion.
For
a very brief time, when I was involved in a study of Khotachiwadi in
Girgaum, some younger residents got together and created a small
virtual version of the village. It had space for every family to upload
its own history and pictures and for everyone to tell their own version
of Khotachiwadi’s history. It was fascinating to see old friends and
enemies (how can any closely knit village exist without deep familial
resentments going back generations?) re-connect with each other through
the website.
Cyber theorists point out that the biggest
distances the Internet manages to overcome are the ones that are
supposedly the closest in physical terms. The language of the net,
always egalitarian and flavoured by the casual touch of friendship,
helps bridge gaps that are psychological, cultural and traditional.
Often it’s just about breaking through the firewalls that exist in the
mind.
When I came across www.dharavi.org,
a wiki-styled site in which anyone can upload information about this
much talked about and misunderstood neighbourhood, I was fascinated.
Finally, Mumbaikars had an opportunity to navigate a place they would
rarely step into in real-time. We may have eaten food prepared and
processed in Dharavi, bought stuff of all kinds made there without even
knowing it but now there is some way of getting to know it better and
actually writing about it.
Trust the web to conjure a virtual
version of a world that most of us are connected to but would never
visit or understand. It makes us realise more than ever that space and
distances are relative things. Even if the site helps us step over
firewalls of prejudice, that’s more than enough.
P.S.
Besides, who knows? The virtual may be the only place that Dharavi
eventually exists, in its present form, with its present residents — at
the rate it is being treated by developmental ambitions.
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