Open Video Conference 2009, New York City

Registration is still open for the first Open Video Conference (6/19-21, NYU Law School), the first major public event of the Open Video Alliance—an impressive collaboration of the Yale Law School's Information Society Project, Kaltura, the Participatory Culture Foundation, iCommons, and sponsored by open source software giants Mozilla and Red Hat as well as more than a dozen other major corporate, foundation, nonprofit and academic players in the open video ecosystem. What is open video, you might ask? Have a watch (in 12 languages!):




I will be speaking on Friday, May 19 about IFTF's research on the future of video and our experimental video-based video research platform, PeopleoftheScreen.org, as well as giving an update on the Global Lives Project.

Radio Interview: Dubai Eye Business Breakfast

I did a radio interview (full recording here) this afternoon for Dubai Eye's "Business Breakfast" talk show. It was a 20-minute one-on-one interview inspired by my BBC article on alternative solutions to the financial crisis coming out of the World Social Forum. Brandy Scott, a most excellent radio host from New Zealand, asked provocative questions and was pretty interesting to talk with.

From http://www.dubaieye1038.com:

The Business Breakfast recently won the International Radio Conference’s “Breakfast Show Of The Year” award.

Presented by Brandy Scott and Malcolm Taylor, the show is the station’s flagship programme. Broadcast every morning on the 103.8 FM frequency from 6am-9am, the Business Breakfast covers local, regional and international business stories.

Other interviews on the morning's show included "Jeffrey Rhodes, CEO of International Assets, watches gold hover around the $1,000 mark," and "Khaled Masri, partner and head of brokerage at Rasmala Investments, discusses the Dubai Financial Market's nine-day rally."

It was pretty exciting to have an audience with this sort of crowd—it definitely did not feel like the sort of "preaching to the choir" that one is often accused of in orbiting the Berkeley/San Francisco activist scene, not to mention in producing documentary film (who watches that other than the converted, right?). They were particularly interested in the World Social Forum and if anyone actually had any real solutions to offer to the current meltdown. I gave them my best—have a listen and let me know what you think!

Ultra Wide Views Exhibit - Montréal Libre Graphics

Check out this amazing panoramic (cycloramic?) & 3D video work being produced all on open source software from the Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 in Montréal. Would love to bring these technologies & technologists together with the Global Lives Project collaborator network and try to produce some interesting content around the globe. Seems like cameras need to be stationary though, which would preclude us from following individuals around, but could allow for interesting still videos.

The Ultra Wide Views Exhibition at Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 from Yuval Levy on Vimeo.

From the video, it also sounds like they spin a single camera around in a circle (video or still?) to capture the whole panorama and then stitch it all together and add moving elements in post-production. At the end though, they show some pretty cool fisheye video—I wonder how far along the software/image quality/rendering capability is getting to turn that sort of fisheye imagery into a cycloramic video if the camera is placed on the ground... From my reading about the Diver Project (now defunct?) and my conversations with my brilliant colleague, Mike Liebhold, it seems like this ought to work well enough with the requisite technologies in place. I wonder how far off it is from me being able to use it though...

Part of me wonders though—didn't I see this like 15 years ago at Disney World or Epcot with a crew bringing some amazing contraption with a bunch of cameras on it down a street in China or something like that? It was quite a while back, but I do remember being coralled into a very large room surrounded by screens that had something like this [transition–cue dream sequence & hazy memory effect]. Ah yes, a few keystrokes later, it's clear that what I was remembering was the Reflections of China exhibit shown in Circle Vision 360°, a technique first used in 1955 (!!) and pioneered by the Walt Disney Company.

I suppose that the moral of the story is that I should spend more time thinking about the future in Tomorrowland and continue to remember William Gibson's oft-cited adage that "The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed."

Thanks to Jon Philips (ReJon.org), Yuval Levy and Lyn Jeffery for the chain of posts that brought this to my little eyes, and to all the awesome and dedicated free/libre software geeks and their dedication to make this technology free and open to the world.

Police Slog Through 40,000 Insipid Party Pics To Find Cause Of Dorm Fire

In the midst of my IFTF research on the future of video, this report from the Onion truly spoke to me...

Police Slog Through 40,000 Insipid Party Pics To Find Cause Of Dorm Fire

From MrJudkins via Jamais Cascio

Talk at CC Salon San Francisco - 4/15/09

Come one, come all! Should be a fun event!

From CreativeCommons.org:

At April’s CC Salon SF, we will hear from three presenters showcasing their innovative international ventures and discussing how CC licenses can be used in international projects to facilitate content sharing and connectivity across borders:

* Miquel Hudin Balsa, Co-Founder of Maneno, a blogging and communication platform built to meet the needs of the Sub-Saharan blogger and writer.

* David Harris, Executive Director of Global Lives Project, an international collaboration of filmmakers, designers, architects, activists, and institutions to chronicle 24 hours in the life of ten individuals from around the globe, forming an innovative video installation and collaborative online video encyclopedia.

* Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, Founder and Director of Global Oneness Project, which seeks to explore how the radically simple notion of interconnectedness can be lived in our increasingly complex world by creating a “living library” of films chronicling the courageous lives of people passionate about sustainability, conflict resolution, spirituality, art, economics, indigenous culture, and social justice.

We’re delighted to have our friends over at PariSoMa host us for the second time in their lovely and inviting space (map and directions). Plenty of street parking is available. Please note, the space is located up two steep flights of stairs, and unfortunately does not currently have elevator access.

Light refreshments will be provided, and since we rely on the generosity of our community to keep us afloat, we’ll be accepting donations for CC at the door.

Check out the event posting on Upcoming and Facebook. We hope to see you there!

CC Salons are global events, and anyone can start one, no matter where you live. We encourage you to check out our resources for starting your own salon in your area.

Talk at Free Culture 2008

This is a video of a talk I gave about Global Lives at the Students for Free Culture 2008 conference at the International House in Berkeley. After having given this talk about 500 times, it's exciting that someone finally managed to videotape it and get it online. This was a particularly abbreviated version, but it gets the point across.

Alternative Views of the Economic Crisis: Another world is probable

The article below was originally published on BBC.com in a series of four pieces on the World Social Forum, held last week in the Brazilian Amazon:

A popular slogan at the Forums in the past has been "another world is possible". This year, at a moment of deepening global financial crisis, a global reconsideration and reshaping of economy and society seems to have moved squarely into mainstream debate. So the slogan may have to be altered to "another world is probable".

Forum participants who attended some of the hundreds of meetings on the crisis, argued that it was interrelated with the crises of food, climate and energy, and that any responses to to the crisis must address these issues as well.

Toolkit

Solutions to the current crisis ranged from the global to the local, with many participants emphasising the importance of a "toolkit" of solutions rather than a single monolithic change.

• Across countless Forum events, environmentalists and labour leaders alike called for a "green New Deal" based on massive public investment in the environmental sector to stimulate job creation as well as environmental preservation.

• For more than a decade, forum-goers have been pushing the idea of the Tobin Tax - a tax on international currency transactions. Named after Nobel Laureate economist James Tobin, who first proposed the idea in the 1970s, the funds collected from the tax (a fraction of 1% of the transaction) would be used as a global fund for development, and for recovering from crises like today's.

• The Bank of the South, launched in 2007 as a development bank by and for Latin America, was also touted as an important ingredient in the toolkit of solutions to the global crisis. Giving the region more independence from existing international financial institutions, the
  bank would also offer the region added insulation from global shocks.

• "Food sovereignty" - a term adopted instead of the better-known notion of "food security" - was hailed by many as a key step for developing nations to become more resilient to emerging food crises. By focusing less on export-led agricultural policies and instead forging strategic local and regional agricultural policies, activists argued, nations would be able to better meet the nutritional needs of their populations.

• Participatory budgeting - a programme for mass participation in municipal budget allocation - is another major ingredient in the toolkit. It was pioneered in the 1990s in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre where the Forum was conceived but has spread across the world. This experiment emphasises the democratisation of financial decision-making - giving every community access to and control over public banks.

Underlying much of the discussion was the sense that the current neoliberal economic model which privileges unbridled competition between nations, companies and peoples is not a sustainable path for the future.

David Evan Harris is Executive Director of the Global Lives Project and Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Future.

Scantily clad protesters blame the World Bank and IMF for the current economic crisis and demand reparations now.

An indigenous leader examines a newspaper photo of a human banner that he and more than 1,000 other native Amazonians created the day before with the help of US-based NGO, Amazon Watch.

South American Presidents Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, Rafael Correa and Fernando Lugo share the stage with leaders of popular social movements including Via Campesina and the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement in an unprecedented gathering at the Forum.

Photos by David Evan Harris, CC-BY 3.0

Featured Commoner: Global Lives on CreativeCommons.org

I just did a very long email interview with Creative Commons and it's now on their front page! Note to readers: if you are a perfectionist, don't ever accept a request for an email interview because you think it will be easier than a spoken one...

Give us a bit of background on the Global Lives project. How did you begin? What is your mission?

Global Lives’ mission is to reshape how people around the world perceive cultures, nations and people outside their communities by collaboratively building a video library of human life experience. The content of our video library “lives” online and is regularly presented to the public in unique open-source video installations and screenings. Our shoots so far have taken place in Malawi, Brazil, Japan, China, Indonesia and the US, and we’ve shown our work publicly in most of those countries and a few others.

Read the full article.

Global Lives on French TV! (France24)

Skip to 02:29 to see segment on Global Lives. Supposedly this is available in Spanish and French too - kudos to whoever finds those links.

China, Sarko and the Games
by FRANCE_24

The Unwieldy World of Peer-produced Video

From the San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 30, 2007, interview with Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia:

Q: Do you plan on adding more audio and video features?

A: There's not a lot of demand for that from the community. An encyclopedia is inherently textual. Audio or video is a little tricky because it's hard to collaboratively edit it. People can just submit stuff, but if you don't like it, you can't fix it, so it doesn't really fit our style.

While communities of collaborators have proven that computer operating systems and encyclopedias can be "peer produced" with extraordinary results, in the unwieldy world of video production, few peer-produced works have managed to gain widespread popularity… until recently that is. In the past few years a convergence of developments in video technologies, bandwidth cost dropping, and new open- and closed-source web video platforms have led to a real flourishing of what we might call “open source video” endeavors.

Makeshift distributed video processing cluster at sunset in São Paulo: With two borrowed laptops and a few major headaches, I managed to compress 18 hours of HDV video to the H264 codec and get it out to translators and collaborators around the globe.

The feature-length film, Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning, is perhaps the most often cited case of a success in this realm. Touted as the one of the most widely seen works in the history of Finnish cinema, the sci-fi parody was produced on a shoestring budget by a network of collaborators distributed across Finland and the world. Star Wreck Studios’ new Wreck a Movie website claims to offer tools that will allow for the production of thousands more works of peer-produced cinema. At the same time, one can hardly consider it an “open” work, as it’s noncommercial, no-derivatives license prohibits any remixing of the work.

The Basement Tapes “wikifilm” project at OpenSourceCinema.org, is an interesting attempt to build another feature-length film by publishing an open and editable script as a wiki and asking audience members to download, remix, mashup, and reupload high-quality clips. In this case the topic of the film is copyright itself, which adds an interesting dimension of reflexivity to the project, as its very construction is an exploration of the subject it addresses. While the technology for collaborating on the video is far from convenient, one can see emerging here an effort to truly build generative communities of collaborators around open video.

One early predecessor of such work that is often forgotten (or deliberately left our) of the history of Web 2.0 is the Independent Media Center or Indymedia. Launched in 1999 during the Seattle WTO protests, the group’s website has allowed uploads and downloads of copyleft video work since long before Wikipedia, CC, or YouTube even existed as organizations.

Then You Win, an initiative of Loin de l'Œil and Yooook in France, is a mashup of a series of traditionally produced documentaries that will be licensed under progressively freer open content licenses depending on how much the group receives in donations. Produced primarily with open-source editing software, the project is pushing limits with both its business model and technical production strategies.

A Swarm of Angels is another movie-making project with an equally innovative business model behind its production, inviting collaborators to subscribe by paying a small fee (£25 for individuals) to join their community and then have privileges to edit wiki scripts and participate fully in the creative process of writing the screenplay. With a sci-fi / thriller orientation, the group eventually aims to raise £1 million through donations and fund production this way. Though not overtly radical in its content, this film, if successful, stands to have a huge impact in terms of remaking the future of the creative process in cinema.

Other emerging projects to take a look at in this realm include DotSUB’s in-browser subtitling tool, Kaltura’s web-based video editor, the wealth of truly open video content at the Internet Archive, CurrentTV’s distributed TV production network, the WikiMedia Commons, and the Otaku remix and anime fansubbing communities.

It’s easy to see from this brief survey of a handful of emerging open and collaborative video works that the field is ripe for collaboration. Looking backwards in time, one might note that the lag between the emergence of widespread desktop word processing and email and the rise of Wikipedia ended up taking a few decades. Desktop video production is still fraught with many more compatibility, format, portability and simple software stability problems than word processing was decades ago, but as the technologies mature and bandwidth increases, it’s inevitable that we’ll see many new projects and processes on the horizon.

Whether or not we might get a peer-produced work of such scope, scale and significance as Wikipedia in the realm of video anytime soon is an exciting topic to speculate on. At its core, such an inquiry hinges on some much deeper questions about the nature of the written textual form, and all of its potential to be classified, standardized, etc., and even effectively disembodied from its speaker, and the effective impossibility of this type of separation of subject and object with visual and even spoken media.

David Evan Harris is the Executive Director of the Global Lives Project and Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Future. Responses welcomed in any medium to dharris [at] iftf [dot] org. This article is being cross-published to the iCommons Annual (2008 edition in press) and Future Now.

Why did I go to Brazil? The Japanese sent me.

PICT2321.JPG, originally uploaded by deharris.

Saw this a few years ago at the Migration Museum in São Paulo, thought it was worth posting. Unexpectedly, my contact with Japan and Japanese culture increased dramatically after I moved to Brazil, mostly due to my friends Helio & Yumi, but also just the generally prominent Japanese presence in São Paulo--much more striking than anywhere in the US that I've been.

Virtually in Japan

Global Lives Japan, originally uploaded by unumediastudio.

I thought that this upcoming trip in July would be my first time ever in Japan, and then I stumbled across this Flickr photo from last year. I suppose I've already been telepresent there at least.

"You will serve me": Inequality, proximity and agency on both sides of the equator

Just sent off the absolute final draft of my master's thesis, complete with all the revisions that came up during the defense. There's an abstract in English, but the rest is in Portuguese.

“Você vai me servir”: Desigualdade, proximidade e agência nos dois lados do equador
Thesis with high res images (9.8mb)
Thesis with low res images (1.9mb)

And here are more photos from the defense and related parties and travels.

Next American City - Update on São Paulo Ad Ban

In São Paolo, outdoor advertising has been outlawed as “visual pollution,” leaving the city’s landscape dotted with blank billboards and decayed frames. A year into the law, how has the city changed?

By David Evan Harrs

A little more than a year ago, São Paolo, Brazil, a sprawling metropolis of more than 11 million inhabitants, became the first major city outside of the communist world to put into law a radical, near-complete ban on outdoor advertising. Known for being the country’s cosmopolitan commercial capital, São Paolo put in place “Lei Cidade Limpa” or “Clean City Law,” and it was an unexpected political success, owing largely to the singular determination of the city’s conservative mayor, Gilberto Kassab. By casting public advertisement as “visual pollution,” Kassab struck a chord with much of the city, conjuring up images of a better, cleaner São Paolo, free from the daily visual assaults of the advertising industry.

Read the full article here...

Brazilians as Hypersocial Internauts (or, A Tale of Technosyncretisms)

The Institute for the Future had me over last week for an exciting day of pondering the future of media, content production and internet usage in Brazil. The experience was one to be remembered: the day consisted essentially of having two super-sharp "futurologists" pick my brain about what distinguishes Brazilians from the rest of the world in their digital habits.

With little prep time, I jotted down a couple dozen thoughts the night before and the morning of, and stuffed my hard disk and computer bag with everything that I could think of that might prove useful for the day. Probably the most interesting things that I had to share with them were the notions of cordiality and the "horror às distâncias" (literally "horror at the distances", probably best translated as the horror of distance) as central characteristics of the syncretically constituted Brazilian psyche, as described by Sergio Buarque de Holanda in the foundational text Raízes do Brasil (Roots of Brazil—no complete translation available), and also a great clip on Brazilian technobrega music from the brilliant film, Good Copy Bad Copy.

The concepts of Sergio Buarque, however, are probably the ones most worth my elaborating on. In his 1930s attempt at outlining the defining elements of what makes Brazilians Brazilian, he drew a portrait of the Brazilian as an intractably social character, cordial to a tee and afraid of even the smallest emotional distances that might arise between themselves and others. To the American, European or Asian traveler in Brazil (I've spoken with all three), even today, the Brazilians are a strikingly social people, always bubbling forth with questions and with never an awkward conversational moment, save for linguistic barriers. Always curious, always friendly, almost never shy—these attributes tend to come out in any discussion of Brazilians held amongst foreigners at least vaguely familiar with the country.

On the other hand, in talking with Brazilians who have lived or are living abroad, one inevitably encounters complaints or even dire psychic crises amongst Brazilians who find their host societies (I can speak safely of at least the US, UK, France, Germany & Japan) to be difficult places to find the types of fluid social interactions that they expected at home. Cold, stuffy, stilted, socially awkward, introverted, and formal are often the complaints heard of these northerly lands from those Brazilians who have ventured far from home at length. One Brazilian friend living in London for 2+ years wrote in his blog about what a pain it was that Londoners expected you to schedule social events so far in advance that despite his reasonably sized social network, he didn't have any friends that he could just call up spontaneously for dinner, a drink or a movie.

Reviving Sergio Buarque's ideas for the 21st century in such a context could help to explain why while the primitive social network site Orkut floundered in the US in 2004-2006, it was exploding in Brazil. Hungry for "social utilities" (a facebookism), Brazilians didn't care that Orkut didn't even come in Portuguese, and in fact, they probably liked the idea that they were getting in on yet another techno-cultural trend imported from the frigid north (despite their complaints while living abroad, Hollywood movies and American TV almost never go unwatched in Brazil today). Building on their famously syncretic tendencies—melding African, European and indigenous South American cultural and religious traditions to form their own distinctive cultures—young Brazilians reappropriated Orkut in what could be seen as one of the most massive acts of technosyncretism to date.

To understand what I mean by technosyncretism, it helps to look a little deeper at the story behind Orkut itself. In a dinner in São Paulo with a Google employee who had been sent to Brazil as part of a mission to revamp the site and actually attempt to turn it into a revenue-generator for Google, I learned some interesting tidbits. As this employee put it, the site really needed a lot of work to really provide what its target audience wanted. Developed originally by Orkut Büyükkökten, a gay Turkish engineer at Google working on the project in his spare time, and then pushed forward by a team of primarily married Indian engineers and designers, it was obvious that a site whose primary users were young, heterosexual Brazilians would need some serious help. As Google strived to make the site generate revenue and accomodate the needs of its core users, they became active participants in the overwhelming force of Brazilian sociability to mold, transform or engulf foreign ideas and cultural practices to fit their own needs and desires, and the process of technosyncretic antropofagia took hold. This form of specifically Brazilian cultural cannibalism was first described in a literary manifesto by poet Oswald de Andrade in 1928 and continues both overtly in artistic and literary works as well as in more subtle and diffuse ways across various cultural arenas.

While many foreigners in Brazil may quickly and easily understand Sergio Buarque's emphasis on cordiality (Orkut's blog asks us, "Are Latin Americans the world's friendliest people?"), the dark side of this friendliness almost certainly goes unnoticed by most casual visitors to the country. The fear or horror of distances of which he writes, however, is probably the more interesting and more telling aspect of the Brazilian psyche. If Brazilians already feared distance in the 1930s, drawing their social relations closer in order to continuously suss out the possibility of any danger lurking around a corner, one can only assume that such a fear in 2008, if indeed it is a continued phenomenon, ought be much more intense, with crime, violence, and economic insecurity continuing and in many cases worsening across the country.

This inchoate notion that I propose here—of the hypersocial Brazilian internaut and syncretic social technology user—is probably worth developing further, especially if I'm ever expected to deliver any additional insights into the future of Brazilian internet usage, media creation and technology adoption. Next empirical steps would be a comparative analysis of SMS usage, Brazilian Orkut user activity/intensity compared with Orkut users of other nationalities as well as Facebook/MySpace usage, and even more basic data such as email, message boards, etc.

On a theoretical level, it would be particularly interesting to look deeper into not only Sergio Buarque's Homem Corial and Raízes do Brasil, but also books like Maria Silvia de Carvalho Franco's Homens Livres na Ordem Escravocrata (1974), where she develops the notion of the class of the social aggregates—those Brazilians living under the regime of slavery but being neither slaves nor landholders—and the way in which their existences revolved around the constant notion of "the favor," always attempting to stay on the good side of the landholders who allowed them to farm their land, but could kick them off at a moment's notice. This precariousness is seen by many present-day Brazilian social scientists as having continuity with 21st century Brazil, where millions of urban residents live in informal slums or favelas. Many, if not most, of these Brazilians depend on unstable jobs in the service sector that could disappear at the whim of employers with whom they have surprisingly personalistic relationships, reminiscent of early 20th century social relations in the US and Europe (see Lewis Coser's infamous paper on the anachronism of modern servants).

I would argue that these types of social conditions of extreme inequality and their relationship to the aforementioned hypersociality—a social phenomenon that frequently walks a fine line between friendliness and clinginess, curiosity and paranoia—are the most interesting areas to be explored. While some might accuse me of badmouthing my gracious hosts of nearly three years, I would hazard a guess that the common portrayals of the Brazilian as friendly to a fault (often verging on characterizations of a facile and naïve race of tropical noble savages) stand a greater chance of offending than my own efforts to dig deeper into the psychology of the people who have left me wondering why the hell I can't just call up my friends to go out for dinner and dancing at 10pm on a Thursday anymore.

Road Trip to LA: 24/7 DIY Video Conference @ USC

Full entry later, for now, check out: http://www.video24-7.org/

Vive la France! Je suis un auteur!

Exciting news!! A paper that Diego Azzi and I published last year with Bangkok-based think tank, Focus on the Global South, has now been translated into French and published as a chapter in a book in France, Coalitions d’États du Sud: Retour de l’esprit de Bandung? [Coalitions of States of the South: Return of the spirit of Bandung?]. You can also download the original chapter in English.

Adbusters article makes a few waves

One of the best things about publishing my recent article in Adbusters, São Paulo: A City Without Ads, has been the massive response its generated all over the web. The magazine was a favorite of mine in high school, and I even brought a stack of them with me to Brazil, in hopes of proving to Brazilians the existence of a critical US counterculture (though the magazine is, of course, published in Canada...). Though I didn't get to write in as much detail as I'd hoped, it did give me a chance to cover the key points.

In addition to the 100+ comments made on the original article and the re"print" on Alternet, which also included my video on the same topic, the article has now been translated into German (São Paulo verbietet Plakatwerbung), Chinese (聖保羅 無污之城) and Portuguese (Imediata).

An email also came in from a guy in Puebla, Mexico, who is starting a local campaign against billboards in his city. It was also cited by World Changing, Yes! Magazine, the World Watch Institute, a Brazilian blogger or two.

Finally, I've also been asked to do a longer follow-up piece another magazine, The Next American City. It should be printed in early 2008.

Global Lives Project Challenge Grant — Donations Welcome!

Fundraising with ChipIn

We've already raised $3,200 towards the $7,500 match, and we've got six weeks to go, so please help our volunteers in Indonesia, Malawi and Japan by donating now! You can also read more about the Black Rock Arts Foundation.

Other good news: As of September, GLP is now an official 501(c)3 tax-exempt organization in the United States. That means that all deductions are tax-deductible — good news for us and you! Our federal tax ID # is 61-1524216.

Thank you for your support!!!!

Update 12/1/07: Thanks to an incredible outpouring of grassroots support, we've managed to meet the challenge grant in its entirety! Thank you to all who contributed! You've made my year! Of course, we're still definitely looking for contributions to help produce our planned shoots and push the project forward, so if you or anyone you know is interested, you can still donate here.

Turbulence Before Take-Off: Life trajectories encountered en route to a Brazilian runway

I awoke up at 5:30 a.m. and dragged myself out of bed into the shower. The time had come for me to leave Brazil, and though I knew that the melancholy would set it soon enough, for now there were practical matters to consider. First and foremost was how to get to the airport. While a taxi would be fast, comfortable and reliable, I did not have the US $43 that this option would require; in fact, even the $12 that I needed to take the airport bus was a strain on my budget. This left me with option #3: to take the subway to a public bus....

Read the whole article accompanied by pretty pictures in Glimpse Magazine or in a slightly more academic form in New Delhi's Sarai Reader.