On any ordinary afternoon, in most cosmopolitan spaces, it is ok for men and women to go out for a drink and ‘chill out’. Most of us do not live life with the concept of ‘morale policing’ breathing down our back. However, in India, as liberal and free a woman...
This post, written by VV’s Research Officer Namita Singh, was originally published in Samas Satellite on 26th January, 2009. The original post can be found here It is around nine in the night in a seemingly sleepy village in Gujarat, India. You can sense there is something different today. Instead...
Yesterday I finished a field visit to one of the Community Video Units Video Volunteers has helped to set up, in rural Rajasthan, in villages outside Jodhpur. Rural Rajasthan is an incredibly colorful and culturally rich area, and so the “Community Video Unit” has lots of potential for great programming...
I am truly surprised at the film that is on everyone’s mind right now and the fact that it happened to be shot just 30 minutes away from my home in Mumbai, India. Slumdog Millionaire is an energetic film with an interesting storyline and was shot entirely in two locations...
Many people today who work in social change are convinced that the typical ‘top down’ approach to development, where bureaucrats and international agencies design large-scale social programs and then impose them on millions of poor people, isn’t working. Instead, they favor the idea of ‘community-led development’, in which communities themselves...
This week, I’ve given a lot of thought to how poor communities on the other side of the digital divide are able to connect. The Internet is now only accessible for a tiny portion of humanity. Probably less than 20% of humanity has regular internet access, and in rural India,...
Ruchika writes: Today I woke up at 8am - the beginning of morning peak hour in Mumbai, and for some reason I couldn't help dozing off to the alarm and enjoying the blissful state of a mini-vacation in this chaotic city. My room faces the main road which is off...
Ruchika writes: It�s been 3 Saturdays in a row and I�m quite sure that the local media companies have saved the �Black Saturday� headlines as one of the frequented templates. Terrorism and bomb blasts have been occurring for decades, and in the last year, it would be a lie to...
