this was mentioned in passing in an item on carbon trading that ran in today’s NOS evening news: the delhi metro is now transporting more passengers per day than the dutch national railways. a quick check on wikipedia shows that this is a bit of an understatement: daily ridership of the delhi metro system is [...]

have been spending the last 2 days in Torino for a succession of workshops and conferences, and have used my spare time to revisit some of the places that here we had planned to install the expertbase during the big torino biennial back in 2002 (before we were kicked out of the exhibition). Seems that [...]

in march we spend a week in bangalore with jamie and the darkfibre crew. we had flown there to take pictures of them while they were shooting for dark fibre (more pictures will become available later). dark fibre crew at work on the rooftop terrace of a IT office building in south bangalore it was [...]

patrice has posted an extensvie piece to the nettime-l mailing list that describes a rather bizarre legal dispute between an indian textile manufacturing company and two dutch internet service providers (one of them being my own). It comes down to the indian company arguing that hosting websites that criticize labor conditions in their manufacturing plants [...]

so over the last three weeks i have been watching ‘kaafila‘ which bills itself as a movie based on the ‘global issue of illegal migration’. it took me 3 weeks to watch because (a) it is a Bollywood movie (and thus runs for three plus hours) and (b) because it is so incredibly bad that [...]

there are two articles about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) in the spring 2007 issue of بدون/bidoun. the second one (‘let them eat laptops’ (p72ff.) – not available online) is a relatively serious email discussion about the merits of the project between a couple of academics. the other article ‘glory‘ by kenyan writer Binyavanga [...]

Sarai independent fellow Zubin Pastakiais talking pictures of old-style bombay cinema halls, and has started posting them to his blog: I am currently photographing cinema halls in Bombay, India, the city in which I live. Here, we still have a mix of older, single-screen halls, and modern multiplexes. I am fascinated by the cinema hall [...]

came across this installation in front of a small internet cafe/phone shop in the Psiri in the center of Athens yesterday: when i took pictures of it a guy the indian shopkeeper of a mini market across the street came out of his shop and asked me why i was taking pictures of this ‘ugly [...]

absolutely no idea why it is called lille *3000* and not some other arbitrary number, but apparently the local government decided that 3000 sounds mighty futuristic (and 2006 would be so last year in three months anyway)and here we go… i am also not sure if lille 3000 is the same as the ‘bombaysers de [...]

… has been close to unbearable in the last couple of days. daytime temperatures in the high 30s and low 40s and high humidity do not really constitute an enjoyable atmosphere. the fact that yesterday night’s garden reception that was hosted by sarai on the occasion of the launch of the sarai reader #06 was [...]