[Sarai is an alternative, non-profit organization in Delhi, India. They
describe themselves as "a space for research, practice and conversation
about the contemporary media and urban constellations." Sarai publishes
an annual "Reader" covering many issues relevant to new media art. In a
recent email exchange, Mike Caloud had the chance to interview Sarai's
"Raqs Media Collective" on their unique institution
(http://www.sarai.net).]

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Mike Caloud: Let's begin with a little background history. How and when
did Sarai begin? What were the interests and motivations?

Sarai: To understand how Sarai began, it may be necessary for us to take
a brief step back to the summer of 1998, when five of us, (Ravi
Vasudevan & Ravi Sundaram from CSDS, and Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula &
Shuddhabrata Sengupta from the Raqs Media Collective) began to conceive
of Sarai.

The summer of '98 was a time for many new beginnings in the city of
Delhi. The nineties had been a decade marked by doubt and rethinking on
many fronts, all of which seemed to have come to a head for some of us
during that summer. There was a sense of disquiet with increasing urban
violence and strife, dissatisfaction with restrictive modes of thinking
and practice within mainstream academia, the universities & the media,
and a general unease at the stagnation that underlay the absence of a
critical public culture.

At the same time, Delhi witnessed a quiet rebirth of an independent arts
and media scene. This became evident in exhibitions and screenings that
began taking place modestly in alternative venues, outside galleries and
institutional spaces, and in archival initiatives that began to be
active. Spaces for dissent and debate were kept alive by clusters of
teachers and students in the universities. New ideas, modes of
communication and forms of protest were being tried out and tested on
the streets. The nuclear tests by India and Pakistan in the summer of
1998 had brought many people out on to the streets of Delhi in
spontaneous protest. There was a vibrant energy evident in street level
improvisations with new technologies. Public phone booths were
transforming themselves into street corner cybercaf