<videovortex> Kashmir's mobile phone chroniclers (fwd from reader-list)

[Patrice Riemens]

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Subject: [Reader-list] Kashmir's mobile phone chroniclers
From:    Shivam Vij शिवम् विज् <mail at shivamvij.com>
Date:    Wed, October 1, 2008 15:39
To:      "sarai list" <reader-list at sarai.net>
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Dear friends,

This is the sort of story that really gives you a sense of the passion
and fervour that goes in the making of an endless freedom struggle in
Kashmir. Thought this might be of interest to members of this list as
it is a list about "media and the city". These protests, their
recording an uploading on YouTube, are very ordinary everyday events
in Srinagar. Violence and resistance have become acts that are
remarkable but not surprising, they form part of the everyday
banalities of living in Srinagar. Srinagar is perhaps the most
interesting city in India today. It is not as touristy as, say
Pahalgam, It is a city with great character, where the people, their
pain, the expression on their faces, will be etched in your memory
more than the size of the Dal lake. If you haven't been to Srinagar,
you have seen neither heaven nor hell. In these online videos captured
by Kashmiri youth, some of that is indeed reflected. Not even a per
cent of this is reflected in the Indian media.

best
shivam



Kashmir's mobile phone chroniclers

By Soutik Biswas
BBC News, Srinagar

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7618092.stm

Minutes after 35-year-old Javed Amir Mir was shot in the head by
security forces in Srinagar, capital of Indian-administered Kashmir, a
young boy recorded his death on his mobile phone camera.

The shaky and grainy clip shows a blood splattered face lying on the
road. You can hear the wailing women and the screaming men in the
background

Across the city, 25-year-old Imran Ahmed Wani's death was also
recorded on mobile phones by friends rushing him to hospital after he
was shot during a demonstration.

In fact, Mr Wani's last days unspool effortlessly on pictures which
can be seen on the mobiles of his friends - in one he is smiling at
the camera, 10 days before his death; in another, life is slowly
ebbing out of him as he lies, legs akimbo, in a ambulance racing to
get him to the hospital.

"We have all these pictures on our phones. His memories live and move
with us," says his friend and mass communications student, Sheikh
Suhail, 24.



'Interesting footage'


As the mainly Muslim Kashmir valley erupted into protests last month
after a row over transfer of land in the region snowballed into a
movement for freedom from India, armies of mobile-phone toting
youngsters began trawling the city to record the events.

Pro-freedom protests in Srinagar
A row over land has snowballed into a nationalist upsurge

The images and recordings of those momentous events have been swapped
between friends, or put up on popular video sharing sites.

One of those, YouTube, spits out nearly 250 results when a search is
done for "Srinagar protest" and many of these clips have been put up
by youngsters from the valley.

There are now mobile phone recordings being swapped around which have
reached almost cult status.

A pro-freedom procession, security forces thrashing children playing
in a city park, a friend or a neighbour shot down during a protest, a
funeral procession.

In a way, the images and clips comprise an uneven chronicle of the
troubled life and times in the valley by these "citizen journalists"
of Kashmir.

"This is a new trend in Kashmir. There are a lot of young people
moving around the city with such mobile phone recordings," says Amjad
Mir of Sen TV, a local news and current affairs channel.

In the restive Batamaloo area in Srinagar, a 29-year-old man, who owns
a small mobile phone shop in the city, says he goes out every other
day with his phone in search of "interesting footage".

"This is the first time ordinary people like us are coming out with
our phones and shooting. This is the only way we can show to the world
what is happening here," says the young man, who prefers to be
unnamed.



'History in making'

During a recent curfew in the valley, he recorded people in his
neighbourhood collecting several thousand bottles of drinking water to
supply a local hospital which had run out.

The Batamaloo man shows me some of his other clips on the phone -
crowds gathering for a demonstration, tyres burning on the streets,
troops chasing crowds. A friend, he says, has clips of a man shot down
by troops on his cheap Chinese mobile phone.

His favourite is a nine-minute recording of a protest demonstration
that he shot on his favourite Nokia phone from a flyover overlooking
the road.

"I have never seen so many people in my life as that day. It was a
big, peaceful demonstration. And I just kept recording," he says.


Chasing events on mobile phones have now become an obsessive hobby
with these young men - they charge their phones regularly every night
and hit the road next morning looking for some action.

A young journalist says the mobile phone chroniclers are usually
internet-savvy students, who shoot clips and upload them on the
internet.

"I want to preserve these memories. They are history in the making,"  
he says.


His favourite clip: local boys demolishing an 18-year-old bunker of
Indian troops in his neighbourhood during the recent agitation.

The Kashmir conflict now seems to have become fully digitalised.
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