A big hit at the International film festival in Goa last year was the Portuguese film Dotcom. An unusual ode to village life, the film describes the accidental ways in which the digital world connects us to each other.

A remote village in Portugal starts its own website thanks to the efforts of an engineer who has recently moved there. He soon discovers that the seven-hundred-year-old village shares its name with a relatively new Spanish multi-national company. The company, of course, shows no patience with history and wants to stamp out the unknown village’s fragile web identity. The film is all about how the villagers — as gloriously divided and fragmented as any human habitat can possibly be — manage to get the better of the company, the government and the many vested interests that swarm around its newly found global visibility.

In the end, the village gets some improved infrastructure while managing to defend its own idiosyncratic way of life. It does this by rejecting some
developmental ambitions that the government wants implemented, more for its own glory than for the benefit of the villagers.

Of course, that’s a feel-good movie. All of us, Bollywood jaded souls, know too well that such happy endings are really a contrast to real life. Only cinematic villages manage to defeat grand empires in cricket matches. Sometimes, comic-book habitats manage to squash mighty empires, but, with the help of a healthy dose of magic potion.

For a very brief time, when I was involved in a study of Khotachiwadi in Girgaum, some younger residents got together and created a small virtual version of the village. It had space for every family to upload its own history and pictures and for everyone to tell their own version of Khotachiwadi’s history. It was fascinating to see old friends and enemies (how can any closely knit village exist without deep familial resentments going back generations?) re-connect with each other through the website.

Cyber theorists point out that the biggest distances the Internet manages to overcome are the ones that are supposedly the closest in physical terms. The language of the net, always egalitarian and flavoured by the casual touch of friendship, helps bridge gaps that are psychological, cultural and traditional. Often it’s just about breaking through the firewalls that exist in the mind.

When I came across www.dharavi.org, a wiki-styled site in which anyone can upload information about this much talked about and misunderstood neighbourhood, I was fascinated. Finally, Mumbaikars had an opportunity to navigate a place they would rarely step into in real-time. We may have eaten food prepared and processed in Dharavi, bought stuff of all kinds made there without even knowing it but now there is some way of getting to know it better and actually writing about it. 

Trust the web to conjure a virtual version of a world that most of us are connected to but would never visit or understand. It makes us realise more than ever that space and distances are relative things. Even if the site helps us step over firewalls of prejudice, that’s more than enough. 

P.S. Besides, who knows? The virtual may be the only place that Dharavi eventually exists, in its present form, with its present residents — at the rate it is being treated by developmental ambitions.

We may have eaten food prepared in Dharavi, bought stuff made there without even knowing it but now there is a way of getting to know it better

URL: http://www.mumbaimirror.com/net/mmpaper.aspx?page=article&sectid=47&contentid=2008022720080227020845226f78af360