From Berkeley to Bombay to Goa

Thursday, July 9, 2009

Tata Nano is a scam!

I just canceled 2 Tata Nano bookings that my family was allotted recently. In my case, I took a bank loan from SBI in Goa and lost around 3400 rupees in interest payments for the 3 month period before the lottery was announced (not counting the 300 rupees it cost to buy a form to fill out)! My parents paid the entire 140,000 Rs for the upper end Nano. We were all seriously disappointed in the Tata company for 2 reasons:

1) They said they would allot our cars between October - December 2010 - that would be a year and a half after it was booked! I would need to start paying monthly instalments right away far before I ever received the car.
2) Customer service told my father he would have to pay another 55,000 Rs in duties, etc. before the car could be delivered. So the 1 lakh car they're raving about would cost at least 1.5 lakhs!

So now we had to do more paperwork to cancel and my parents refund will take another month! I end up losing the 3700 rupees I spent ... all because Tata was not honest enough to reveal this information to its customers earlier... inspite of all the press the 'people's car' has been receiving!

I hope this doesn't get repeated with the Nano electric car that I heard will be coming out in the future, because I would really like to buy one.

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Discovering definitions of Digital Media and Learning

In March this year, I got the most pleasant surprise of my life. A phone call from David Theo Goldberg at the University of California at Irvine telling me I was one of the winners of the 2009 Digital Media and Learning competition!

I had applied almost 6 months earlier, after Jay Dedman, a wonderful videoblogger from the US emailed me about the competition. Soon I approached Madhusudan Agarwal of Mam Movies and Angana Jhaveri, an independent filmmaker in Bombay to collaborate on the grant application. Unfortunately, Mam Movies later withdrew when we had different ideas about the management of the project. Subsequently, Video Volunteers became the organizational partner for 'Women Aloud: Videoblogging for Empowerment'.

WAVE as it's now acronymized (I know this is not a word), involves training 30 college age women from marginalized backgrounds - one from each state in India - to video blog about their perspectives on community issues. Since there's also 30 days in a month, we will have a new video up everyday from a different part of India highlighting a different story on that month's theme.

I believe this is the first project of its kind in India, and I'm incredibly excited to see how it works out. We have many aims for the project: empowerment, training community/ citizen journalists, offering a livelihood skill, promoting the spirit of activism and engagement in civic and social issues, and the list goes on...

Fortunately, we have been funded the entire amount that we requested - $107,000 - for the first year of this project, by the admirable MacArthur Foundation and HASTAC, to buy equipment, pay stipends to women participants and pay staff. But we will need to find a way to make the project sustainable for the future.

I highly recommend that you check out the fantastic projects that were winners in this competition. It's inspiring to see people committed to innovative training such as 'Virtual Peace' where you learn about public policy and distributing emergency funds through an interactive game or 'Digital Ocean' where kids learn about underwater life and conservation. Other projects I loved were 'Black Cloud' where kids measure atmospheric pollution in their schools, 'Fractor' where they publish news and related actions readers can take.

Meeting the people behind these projects at the two day winner's reception in Chicago in mid April was like a feast for my new media thirsty, social entrepreneur soul!

Another concept I enjoyed was Plork, the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, where computer science and music majors make music off keyboards while a conductor synchronizes them.

Then there were inspirational international personalities like Ramsey Tesdell who works in citizen media projects in Palestine, South African and Mexican Chiapas school principals encouraging literacy through mobile phones and low-cost laptops...