WorldsTouch
I finally spoke with Vikram today about the main project I may be involved in here in Darjeeling. He was a hard guy to reach, and I started taking his elusiveness personally until I watched him once we did get together. His phone was constantly beeping and flashing and buzzing. He would suddenly drop out of the conversatiion, do some sort of thumb gymnastics that I surmised was text messaging, and then zoom back in, as fully present as he had been.
Anand, my daughter's friend with whom we had a lovely walk last weekend, told us that when his phone rings, he shrugs and tells people, "Sorry, I'm Indian, we take our calls," and then answers his phone. Where I come from, you glance at the screen to make sure it isn't somebody who might be having an emergency, and then switch the call off. It's rude to let the phone interrupt your meeting. But here, nobody thinks anything is out of order. I wonder whether this holds true at the higher levels of business and commerce, but it certainly does at the meetings I've been having.
I suspected that Vikram was avoiding me because he originally wrote to me that there is an association of nonprofits here, some of which would very much like to do a workshop in video production like the kind we do at home. I had emailed him a tentative workshop plan, a four- or five-day schedule and then hadn't gotten a response. Then it took three days before I finally chased him down at his university office (wading through a downpour that defeated my new umbrella).
It is true that he didn't have the nonprofit association thing organized, but he had a better idea. The nonprofit association has no central person to contact and set everything up with, but there is a group he's filmed called the Shankar Foundation, which is an association of folks with HIV/AIDS that does have a contact person. He thinks that group may be willing to do the video workshop.
I showed him movies from our last Movies without Borders class and he started to grasp what it is we do. He is simply not used to the simplicity and lack of high-end equipment we use to get our stories told.
"It's really about the storytelling, isn't it?" he said. Yes, I said. That and getting the power of their own voices out to people who have access to computers, but not much else.
We got an incredible amount of planning done in the hour we spent together, and I think that's what I enjoy so much about this world. Instead of spending any time on naysaying and resistence, people just get down to what we need to be thinking about. We have unpredictable power cuts here. So if we use the university laptops, fully charged, we can still get our editing work done on them, at least the four hours they will have power. since the power is out roughly a couple of hours at a time, the laptops can get charged between power outages.
The mentors we use will come, handpicked, from the university students in Vikram's classes. They need the experience for their resumes. And it will be good for them to work at the level we're working at, that is, the grass roots. The sound is a problem for them, since they don't have sophisticated sound equipment. In fact, the sound booth where we talked was lined with cardboard egg cartons, "we make do with local materials." We'll use my little USB recorder and I think he has one as well.
What about phone photos and videos? That would be even cooler, since the whole world has phones here.
Nothing, of course, is really decided. "It sounds fine as long as you can work in chaos," was Natasha's comment when I described the process here. As I left, I said to Vikram, "This is sounding about 20 per cent planned at this point," and he agreed. He'll talk to the guy at the Shankar Foundation and put up a sign-up sheet for participants and round up student-mentors and we may just have ourselves a workshop. Or not.
At any rate, I have to be here for another week to finish my root canal. For the strong of heart, you may want to drop by my personal blog to hear about THAT process, but keep in mind that the opinions expressed are mine-- as ethnocentric as we all are if we're honest. By the end of next week, I'll either be moseying on to other places and other messes, or I'll be doing something to further the power of technology to support regular people and the nonprofit orgs that serve them.
I finally spoke with Vikram today about the main project I may be involved in here in Darjeeling. He was a hard guy to reach, and I started taking his elusiveness personally until I watched him once we did get together. His phone was constantly beeping and flashing and buzzing. He would suddenly drop out of the conversatiion, do some sort of thumb gymnastics that I surmised was text messaging, and then zoom back in, as fully present as he had been.
Anand, my daughter's friend with whom we had a lovely walk last weekend, told us that when his phone rings, he shrugs and tells people, "Sorry, I'm Indian, we take our calls," and then answers his phone. Where I come from, you glance at the screen to make sure it isn't somebody who might be having an emergency, and then switch the call off. It's rude to let the phone interrupt your meeting. But here, nobody thinks anything is out of order. I wonder whether this holds true at the higher levels of business and commerce, but it certainly does at the meetings I've been having.
I suspected that Vikram was avoiding me because he originally wrote to me that there is an association of nonprofits here, some of which would very much like to do a workshop in video production like the kind we do at home. I had emailed him a tentative workshop plan, a four- or five-day schedule and then hadn't gotten a response. Then it took three days before I finally chased him down at his university office (wading through a downpour that defeated my new umbrella).
It is true that he didn't have the nonprofit association thing organized, but he had a better idea. The nonprofit association has no central person to contact and set everything up with, but there is a group he's filmed called the Shankar Foundation, which is an association of folks with HIV/AIDS that does have a contact person. He thinks that group may be willing to do the video workshop.
I showed him movies from our last Movies without Borders class and he started to grasp what it is we do. He is simply not used to the simplicity and lack of high-end equipment we use to get our stories told.
"It's really about the storytelling, isn't it?" he said. Yes, I said. That and getting the power of their own voices out to people who have access to computers, but not much else.
We got an incredible amount of planning done in the hour we spent together, and I think that's what I enjoy so much about this world. Instead of spending any time on naysaying and resistence, people just get down to what we need to be thinking about. We have unpredictable power cuts here. So if we use the university laptops, fully charged, we can still get our editing work done on them, at least the four hours they will have power. since the power is out roughly a couple of hours at a time, the laptops can get charged between power outages.
The mentors we use will come, handpicked, from the university students in Vikram's classes. They need the experience for their resumes. And it will be good for them to work at the level we're working at, that is, the grass roots. The sound is a problem for them, since they don't have sophisticated sound equipment. In fact, the sound booth where we talked was lined with cardboard egg cartons, "we make do with local materials." We'll use my little USB recorder and I think he has one as well.
What about phone photos and videos? That would be even cooler, since the whole world has phones here.
Nothing, of course, is really decided. "It sounds fine as long as you can work in chaos," was Natasha's comment when I described the process here. As I left, I said to Vikram, "This is sounding about 20 per cent planned at this point," and he agreed. He'll talk to the guy at the Shankar Foundation and put up a sign-up sheet for participants and round up student-mentors and we may just have ourselves a workshop. Or not.
At any rate, I have to be here for another week to finish my root canal. For the strong of heart, you may want to drop by my personal blog to hear about THAT process, but keep in mind that the opinions expressed are mine-- as ethnocentric as we all are if we're honest. By the end of next week, I'll either be moseying on to other places and other messes, or I'll be doing something to further the power of technology to support regular people and the nonprofit orgs that serve them.
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