Editor’s Preface
I walk through an alley, among children and hawkers and goats, in the centre of New Delhi, very near the LNJP Hospital. In a long, narrow room on this alley, there are young men and women, in their late teens and early twenties, who have been gathering here for a few years, under the direction of Sarai-CSDS and Ankur (an NGO that explores alternatives to formal education), to work in sound, image and text, and through these to think about the city and the neighbourhood they live in.
They are children of autorickshaw drivers, tailors, embroiderers. Their parents have almost all arrived here from the rural areas, and set up homes in colonies which are often deemed illegal and demolished. Many of these young men and women have dropped out of school in order to work, or because they could not clear their exams. I am here to talk to them about their texts, which I deeply admire.
It is a winter morning in Delhi, not early, but a rooster crows continuously right outside the window. Children play, the hawkers call, women shout to one another.