Day One in Bow Bazaar: The Session

Posted on November 27, 2007 by Sahar Romani

Yesterday (Monday, November 26th 07), marked Session 1 of Neighbourhood Diaries in Bow Bazaar Neighborhood in partnership with local NGO Sanlaap.

Venue: Bow Bazaar Highschool

Time: Mondays, 6:00 – 8:00pm

Participants: 15 youth residents in Bow Bazaar

November 26th, 2007

Session 1: Understanding Neighbourhood Stereotypes

Objective
The Need for Neighborhood Journalism. To understand how it is important to re-write and re-tell your neighborhood’s narrative.

Activity: Understanding Assumptions and Hegemonic Narratives (30 minutes)

1. Divide the group in two groups. Give each group an, unlabelled photograph and ask them to collectively write a description of the image. Create a story behind the place – where is it, what happens there? What type of people live there? (10-15 min)

What are their 1st impressions?
What is happening in the picture?
What do these aspects of the picture tell us about the locality?
When people pass the place, what ideas do they form about it?

The two images are of New York city (an image of a socio-economicallydisadvantaged neighborhood) and Kolkata (a socially and economically upward) neighborhood.

2. Each group should read aloud their description and share their thought process behind their caption/description. (15 mins)
(Make a note of the exploratory questions that bring out better answers. As a facilitator, what are good questions to ask? Good eye contact, speak slowly and clearly)

3. Facilitators should then share the real facts of the images. Discuss at length the difference between the young people’s imagined stories and the real stories. How was our imagination informed? Where do we get certain ideas from about places, spaces, and people?

4. Discuss the phenomena of assumptions and stereotyping. How thought gets stuck at particular places. We do not ask, do not think of asking whether there is anything beneath the obvious assumptions about the place.

BREAK

Your Neighborhood: Discussion and Activity on Stereotypes (30 minutes)

Discussion
From a bigger scale let us now come down to our own paras/neighborhoods.
Just like we’ve realized the false/fragmented/skewed stories around different neighborhoods, how do you think other people think or imagine your personal neighborhood? What are the stereotypes surrounding your neighborhood?
Our thoughts often get stuck around some obvious things we see around, or some particular things that repeatedly surface on TV or in newpapers.eg. New York has highrises, this is true, but this is only one truth about New York. There are several other truths that we do not get to know. When a journalist comes to your para, what are the particular things he wants to cover/research more?

Collage Activity
Create a collective collage of images, sounds, words, smells about how the common person may interpret our neighborhood. Draw, Write, Cut and Paste.

Discussion
What are the common assumptions surrounding our neighborhood? Talk and explain in images. What is missing in this collage? What Truths are being circulated? What Truths are beings silenced and ignored? What stories aren’t being told? If we knew more untold stories, what would that do? How would that change perceptions?

Conclusion: Explaining the Project, Neighbourhood Diaries
This is how the outsider sees Bow Bazaar . Do you think it is important to tell the stories of this neighborhood as an insider and resident? What are the ways in which you, an insider, see Bow Bazaar? We believe the best sources of knowledge are your minds, your eyes, your words. The best expert to tell neighborhood stories is you. In the coming 15 weeks we shall try to search and find out what the inside stories of Boubazar look like. And you will find out, not us. In this workshop you will work as a Neighborhood Journalist telling the story of your lanes, you homes, your neighbors.

Writing Activity
Can you tell us a story about your neighborhood, which only you know? It can be a moment only, or an incident you are not likely to forget. Have the participants write and share their story? After listening to the story, explore how it gives a new life, new dimensions to understanding their neighborhood — and thus how this story needs to be told?

Check Out
How was this session like? Good/bad/Okay?
How do you feel about participating in the coming sessions? 1 word.

Monsoon Progress

Posted on October 11, 2007 by Sahar Romani

This monsoon has been marked with achievements and challenges as we begin the groundwork for Neighbourhood Diaries. We’ve spent the last two months (August and September) setting up the infrastructure for ND – from staff, to partners, to neighborhoods.

Staff:
It took us quite some time to select the right team of educators for Neighborhood Diaries. August and September were spent looking at applications and facilitating interviews. After meeting many individuals – we are privileged to have Urbi Bhadhuri and Bina Dalui. Both Urbi (a post-graduate in literature from Jadavpur University, experience in alternative education work in West Bengal and Rajasthan, and a passionate to create spaces of writing in Calcutta) and Bina (formerly a poetry workshop participant in Kalam and an activist around issues of women and child rights) are hired on as Kalam staff and will be leading Diaries as workshops begin in November.

Partners:
We’ve been meeting with various local ngos and community based organizations exploring options for supporting partners and suitable neighborhoods to launch Diaries. Keeping in mind that Diaries is a pilot project we finally decided that is best to work with partners we have strong, trustworthy relationships. We are planning to work with Sanlaap and DIKSHA. Sanlaap is an anti-trafficking organization committed to ending violence against women and children. Working in West Bengal over decades now, Sanlaap has shelter homes for survivors of trafficking and community drop-in-centers for youth at risk to violence. In Sanlaap’s Bow Bazaar community drop-in-center, Kalam will begin Diaries.

The second group – DIKSHA – remains tentative for the time being. Although they are partner we would like to work with and while they are interested in the project, there are two challenges we are still negotiating: 1) the set up of a safe blog station and 2) language of instruction. DIKSHA – is a small and budding grassroots organization working with youth on identity and rights in different urban slums throughout the city. DIKSHA is keen on implementing Diaries in Khidderpore – a Hindi and Urdu speaking dominated neighborhood. Diaries therefore would be facilitated and experienced in Hindi instead of Bangla. While this is an exciting prospect for Diaries to consider (especially in terms of diversifying language and readership), it also means having greater resources and time for its implementation. The second challenge is the set up of a 24 hour safe, blog station. DIKSHA’s community drop-in-center is a rented from the greater Khiddderpore community. Conversations with DIKSHA continue to see if we can work out these crucial details to begin our work.

Timeline:
As the initial groundwork for Diaries takes place, we are considering an important shift in timeline. Workshops are scheduled to start post Durga Puja (Kolkata’s most famous and extravagant festival), hence, first week of November will mark our first session. However, instead of beginning work in two neighborhoods simultaneously we are considering beginning facilitating Diaries workshops simultaneously. Keeping in mind Kalam’s working capacity as a budding organization, planning for safe blog stations, and exploring options for Hindi workshop, we think it will be more effective to work with group consecutively. Through facilitating workshops consecutively we can work with greater focus on the dynamics and nuances of each particular neighborhood, and we can also evolve the challenges our first neighborhood workshop into strengths for our second neighborhood workshop.

This is where we are for the time being. The curriculum is coming to life slowly. Stay tuned for more updates by us. We plan to be around.

The old Neighbourhood of Bow Bazaar

Posted on October 8, 2007 by Sahar Romani

Bow Bazaar is an old, bustling neighbourhood in Central Calcutta stretching along Bipin Behari Street to Mahatma Gandhi Road, between the city's old college district and primary train station, Sealdah. This locality is bustling with a market of jewelers, carpenters, and musical instrument craftsmen, and is also made of crooked alleys and lanes — notorious for being home to one of the city's red-light areas and famous for being city's oldest Chinatown.

This vibrant locality is the first site where Kalam will be implementing Neighbourhood Diaries. In partnership with Sanlaap, a local human rights organization, Neighborhood Diaries will begin work with 12 young resident living in the locality's red-light area starting the first week of November.

Sanlaap has been working in Bow Bazaar's redlight area for over a decade now. It established an after-school youth community center at the local Bow Bazaar High School where youth from the surrounding slums and redlight areas attend after-school academic support classes, creative art classes, other youth empowerment programs.

Neighbourhood Diaries will be setting up a studio in Bow Bazaar High School as an evening program for youth associated with Sanlaap. Presently, conversations continue with Sanlaap on youth selection, computer safety, and the mobilizations of community involvement. Thus far it has been determined that Neighbourhood Diaires will take place once a week with a group of 16-19 year olds.

With more logistics cemented in the coming week, we are eager to start workshops after Durga Puja, and see how youth journalists will give voice to Bow Bazaar.

Thinking Curriculum

Posted on August 20, 2007 by Sahar Romani

Kalam's new grassroots journalism program is beginning its work on the ground in October 07 — after school exams and after Calcutta's famous festival Durga Puja. Until then, we at Kalam are engaged in the necessary imaginative and logistical ground work for Neighbourhood Diaries.

The Logistics? We're meeting up with various local NGOs that work in various slum neighborhoods, to discuss the vision of Neighbourhood Diaries and the pragmatics of implementing the program. We have yet to finalize who are partners will be for pilot phase — but that decision will be made very soon.

The Imagination? Curriculum. Kalam has been facilitating writing workshops in various genres with adolescents for three years now. Neighborhood Journalism is something we've experimented with in different contexts and situations. Now, we're working on consolidating our activities and lessons of Neighborhood Journalism into a curriculum. The Neighbourhood Diaries curriculum will be rooted in skills of critical visual literacy, ethnographic research, creative journalism, and digital literacy. Thematically, the the curriculum will be steeped in understanding, researching and writing about our Neighbourhoods through identities of our self, our community, and our experience of place. Thematically, our curriculum will explore the following ideas:

Self… Exploring the self: how do others see us? How do we see ourselves? Talk about Identities. Activity/Writing Activity: Locating one object with which you identify, or something that symbolizes your self-perceived or self-defined identity. Photo Assignment: Self-portrait and Photo of the identity object. Self-inquiry; developing the spirit of questioning/interrogating self and beyond.

Home… Home as a space which is a mixture of both desirable and undesirable elements. A part of your home you like, a part of your home you do not like that much (What memories are associated with these spaces? What issues come up?). A part of your home you like, a part of your home you do not like that much. Objective: Critical consciousness of personal space.

Experience of Place… Two specific places in the neighbourhood that has significance for you… description, daily activities, histories. Vignettes, focusing on details and based on observation and researched histories. Photo Assignment: Photographs of the places, from different angles/perspectives or at different times of the day, representing different aspects of the same physical spot. Developing research skills, consciousness of subaltern histories.

Neighbours, Community, People… Discussion: Looking at people as characters. Writing Activity: Select one person in the neighbourhood and make a Portrait Sketch, based on observation, interview, researched personal histories. Photo Assignment: Portraits + Photo series depicting the daily life of the subject. Researching Life Stories.

Through the end of monsoon we hope to finalize a draft our working curriculum. Of course, we are certain that as we begin our workshops on the ground, planned sessions will alter, new themes will emerge, ideas will transform. And we are looking forward the insight Experience will offer.