Stories about South Asia from March, 2005
Blog libel suit in India
Mediaah! is no more. The controversial media criticism weblog, run by Pradyuman Maheshwari, editor of the Maharashtra Herald in Pune, promoted itself as a “brutally unbiased” critic of Indian media,...
Video Blog: Baramati Bus Stop
This weekend I completed a short Web documentary on my visit to a mobile computing lab in Baramati, India last week. The video, called Baramati Bus Stop, is about six and a half minutes long. It explores the mobile computing lab, which features two dozen thin-client computers installed on a bus. I also show my visit to a rural primary school classroom, and meeting some of the local village children who aren't enrolled in school -- and thus have no access to the technology. I've made two versions of the video, one without captioning and one with captioning. Both versions of the movie are quite large - more than 45 megs. So you may want to let the video download for a brief time before trying to stream it. Better yet, download the whole thing first so you won't have to worry about it pausing due to bandwidth bottlenecks. The movie is released on a Creative Commons noncommercial/attribution/share-alike license, which means it may be viewed, disseminated and even edited for educational and noncommercial purposes. For those of you who are interested in how I made the video, here are some quick tech specs. I shot the video on a Canon A60 digital camera, capturing about 15 minutes of footage, on location in Baramti, India. I uploaded this footage to my Mac G4 laptop and edited it using Final Cut Pro. Music was licensed from ProductionTrax.com; licenses for four songs cost approximately USD $30. For voiceover (narration) I used Final Cut Pro's voiceover tool, spoken through a LogiTech USB headset mic. Captioning was also done using Final Cut Pro. The total editing process, from uploading footage to exporting the movie as a Quicktime file, took approximately eight hours over the course of several days. Anyway, please check it out when you get a chance and let me know what you think. -andy
Dina Mehta on the Indian blogscene
Dina Mehta, a brilliant Indian anthropologist and blogger, just published an article on the emergence of the Indian blogosphere for online magazine Nirantar. Referencing Malcolm Gladwell's new book, “The Tipping...
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