| Doors of Perception 4 S P E E D - S P E A K E R T R A N S C R I P T -
Jogi Panghaal: Mapping the Pulse Any Indian street or marketplace today displays the existence of objects that work at different speeds. There is a space to tolerate this diversity. We accept that things that beat differently can co-exist on the same platform, on the same road, in the same e shop.
 As much as we accept that diverse range of speeds can coexist in an open manner, we also accept that these speeds in as much diversity are situated within us as well. In fact one makes for the other. If we didn't have the cultural hunger or the memory for a particular way of addressing our feeling for our needs, we would not have the object or the service for it in the market! We use speed to be with times, to not to be left behind. We use it to be included. But at the same time we use other speeds to be in rhythm with deeper inside. This rhythm comes to us from the seasonal cycles, with working closely with nature, with using natural materials and processes and by witnessing and being part of our life cycles. Cyclical time -- not linear one way highways.
 We seem to be riding several speeds simultaneously! A speed to be with this world, and other speeds to be with other worlds. It does not mean that there is a harmonious co-existence among these speeds but a constant contest and negotiation to move on between what is possible to what is desirable! Our objects and services that address our daily needs are symbols of this bridging process. We rarely reject anything. But make it our own. We may not make everything ourselves, but we almost always transform it in our own image, in our own speed. These processes that we use to make these entities our own come from our inner sources, from other notions of speed and time. Like life after death. For an Indian mind, death is not the final good-bye but a necessary aspect in a scheme of things that are essentially transient, where patterns become more important than the individual foot prints, where journey is more important than the destination. Clearly economic compulsions also play a major role to make large sections of our people including artisans to use recycling as an essential survival necessity. The connections are made with life processes. Women are still in charge of activities connected with home, food, caring and repairing. In this role they continue to visit the sources that nourish and nurture these rhythms. Following on artisans and craft persons imbibe and translate the beats of these cycles into products and services much the same way as our food is packed with these rhythms. The objects that they make sensate with these beats. When we use them, we sensate too. We thus continue to be define d by these beats, with their rhythm.
 When objects with different beats, alien rhythms proliferate and are seen to be successful in market places, processes to refix their rhythms to culturally more acceptable levels start. This is not to suggest that we stay unaffected through all this. But f or mass informal sector markets of the sub-continent objects and services are almost always reconfigured in terms of acceptable levels of speeds. Telephone is a good example. Nobody had quite visualised that it will give rise to so many new businesses and services. Telephones have been there for well over 100 years now but India lived in an extremely regulated telecom regime until 10 years ago when it was decided to open the sector, by a significant new vision that appeared on Indian horizon in mid-eighties which encouraged liberal connections across the country, particularly to those who wanted to set up their own PCO's or public call offices as we call them. This was done without the help of any multinational telecom group. In these 10 years India has rediscovered its geography. With hundreds of thousands of PCO's dotting the national landscape, public call business has given rise to totally a new range of services and by one estimate has created more jobs than perhaps industry did in comparable period ! This gigantic effort at service design with its own forms of selective materialisation of some of its aspects was again evolved by and large by people themselves without any help from professional entities like designers or design institutions but wit h active collaboration of artisans or what rightfully should be called information technology crafts persons. They worked out new services and created new synergies between other services like couriers, photocopies faxes etc. Today we are on the threshold of connecting all of India's 600,000 villages. You can well imagine the potential or perhaps a missed potential! We have to keep in mind that people possess the rhythms or the memories of other rhythms. Objects and services find their origin and home in these rhythms. The skill with which a need and a solution can be invested with a fitting sensibility -- with similar beat normally determines how successful a particular solution is.
 If in our daily life, activities and objects do not resonate with our inner beats, then these beats find the ways to nurture themselves. Fundamentalists find easy and ready spaces there. In fact Internet is getting crowded with sites that address themselves s to this vacuum created by mono-speeds. Cultural diversity is the first victim of such a mind set!
 We have to create platforms for access which would facilitate and help people to cross the hurdles of economic, cultural and political barriers and connect with each other in exploring new opportunities and finding solutions to their own needs. These plat forms should truly address the needs to develop languages of collaboration which will help identify, develop and invest sensibility in what we do. Perhaps cultural sensibility is another kind of platform, and we have to develop ability, sensitivity and responsibility to use these as vehicles of our work. Our objective should be to make these platforms accessible to much larger number of people in a culturally sensitive manner. It would also continue to link them with their own contexts in a new way. In other words we need to develop enabling contexts, where people, artisans, performers, irrespective of casts, gender affiliations can come together and find new ways to address our needs and continue to be meaningfully connected to this world. Information Technologies promise a new services centred society. In South, there is a long history of doing things through services without materialising the solutions. This approach needs to be promoted and also supported with modern design input to ensure that services meet modern needs but do not lose out on their inherent beat at which they do those things. Perhaps cultural beats could be core of the new service forms. Strength of cultures like Indian sub-continent is that it provides a huge range of solutions for its various needs. There is an amazing scale and range of beats here! This diversity must be nurtured and encouraged in the context of emerging service societies. Existence of such a variety of ways of doing things at such different speeds is also an acknowledgment that cultures continue to find ways to survive and in an increasingly mono-speed global environment. Nature of Information Technology and emerging service oriented society give rise to the hope that the so-called primitive, backwards and slow cultures that still beat a historical rhythm may actually represent a value for which there may in fact be new markets!
 Platform like Internet has created vast new spaces of potentials. Spaces within homes, within communities. It provides the possibility to create a new sub-continent of the mind, a virtual territory of shared sensibilities that are connected in a voluntary manner to each other, offering and taking services that are available, It has created new imaginary thresholds today where you can return (virtually) if you are living in fast lane and want to nurture your inner rhythm! It also makes it possible for you t o virtually escape if you want to visit a fast lane! In our contexts virtual returns and virtual departures hold particular promise to the communities that have suffered on account of migrations of its people to more attractive economic territories. Like Indian film industry created an actual India, Internet perhaps would create a new virtual India of connected Indians, wherever, into a constantly renewing and available experience, throbbing and alive, offering to whoever, the choices, skills and ability to ride multiple speeds. Along the information highways, infobahns, there would also be the Indian Roads, not necessarily offering only destinations but also journeys -- that perhaps would help us to reach into our own beats! |
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url: DOORS OF PERCEPTION editor@doorsofperception.com |