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There are 6 cyber café serving, arguably, a million people. We found and profiled 5 of these. All are recent, the oldest around 13 months ago and youngest, a week old. That demand for internet is an emerging phenomenon was interesting in itself.. All of them had pirated software or a single licensed copy generously shared with the network. All had attached communication centres offering public telephony. One had an adjoining business of textile retail. All cafés have attached business and without exception, offer public telephonic services. Some have Xerox/printing options and mobile phone services. Space being premium PCs, usually 4-8 in a café, are crowed into as many cubicles. It is claustrophobic space, to say the least. But cafés get crowded all day, mainly visited by male youth who are busy surfing the internet. The most popular activity is visiting the chat-room at Yahoo! Youth spend hours, as much as 8 hours a day, chatting with on-line friends. Internet is popular with students for information search and mail. Gaming happens but limited due to lack of networking resources. PC’s are brought with pre-loaded games. Of course, all are pirated including windows software.
Typically, café owners run a parallel family business alongside the cyber café. Catering, cloth merchandise, printing, are older business. The communication centre offering telephonic services are reportedly losing business due to proliferating mobile phones and cheap calling rates. At least two out of the five cafés were managed by teen age college students wanting to move out of family businesses.
Ram Kumar, 17, who manages Devi Communication, says:
We, my brother and I, are handling the café on our own. We alternate and sit in the café to manage our college timings. We want to get bigger a better place, as this is too small and can barely accommodate four computers. …Having started the café we surely have had a boost in our reputation People find it nice to see us, so young and all, handling a business … Internet is fast catching because of its speed and you can find anything on Google… In terms of the café we now have second hand and assembled computers, but in the future we want new PCs and provide better facilities, of web-cams, better systems, etc. Right now our focus is to finish studies…”
Regi runs the most fancy of cafés in Dharavi. It is air-conditioned and has 7 computers and good decoration inside of the café.
“… We are the biggest and the best in this area. We have 50 to 60 clients visiting us every day. Many of them like the air-conditioning from the heat of Mumbai and visit us even from neighboring areas… We have a cloth retail next door our family business but we acquired this area to begin internet. We got cousins from our native place who learnt computers and they run the show here…”
Café owners believed Dharavi offered the cheapest going rates for services. Edward, running a small café, wanted to diversify into desktop publishing, with his computers, “…It’s been only five months since me and my brother started the café. You see it is on the mezzanine floor above a cloth shop”. The brothers have rented the place and currently have four computers. The computers are second hand and hence required cheaper capital. In the future he plans to get into printing business; jobs like those of printing banners, cards. He said, “… Dharavi is a major market for printing, because it is the only place where you’ll get the cheapest printing rates. The printing job is public related. The more connection we have with the public the more business we’ll get. With those intentions I started the café…” He is worried about the printing business being risky with good possibility of clients wanting ‘to forge documents’. He nevertheless wanted to start one!
Café owners adopt a furtive attitude towards privacy in café premises. As noted, there is awareness of regulatory norms that turn ambiguous in practice (The crowed cubicles and predominance of male youth are common observations). Interestingly, there is a slippage between these ‘irregular’ youth activities inside the café and its embeddedness in Dharavi’s contested legal status as a residential slum, an active community and a bustling economic unit. There is large amount of literature around the contested status of Dharavi’s economic history13 and nature of re-development politics14. It would be understating to suggest small business in Dharavi come under a cloud of unregulated practices. Functioning Internet cafés operate very much within this paradigm as there is little scope for economic transactions outside of the penumbra of the non-formal commercial culture. It is little wonder what goes on inside the café are above board!
Of gamers and chatters
“It seems ‘the newest hotspot belongs to the internet café. Where else can the young go to travel the world in an hour, spill your heart out to millions, and get the latest news, gossip, and trends from every possible source?”15
Chatting, dating and ensuing social relations are often denied or considered illegitimate and pursuing these through the internet in a café almost seem like an allegory of the informality or even illegality of business ethics. However, we know little from research about how youth sexuality is culturally constructed and what structural arrangements enhance or inhibit sexual experiences. Several studies and reports in India dwell on youth sexuality from a social health perspective. For example, a better known work, Leena Abraham’s (2002, 2001) study of ‘heterosexual peer networks and partnerships among low-income, unmarried, college-going youth in an Indian metropolitan city’ tackles the issue to contribute towards designing culturally relevant sexuality education and the planning of appropriate sexual health services. Nevertheless, un-coded and partially regulated spaces such as the cyber café and access to the world of internet in them are emerging unsupervised spaces for youth to explore socially restricted practices.
Embedded in cyber café non-formality are young chatters and gamers who perceive chatting and gaming as social needs that internet fulfills. As we discovered these enthusiastic internet addicts we saw the ‘social needs’ linked to secrecy around dating, expressing sexuality and coded flirting behaviour. What struck us is the fit between the greyness of cyber café status as legitimate business in low-income neighborhoods and the greyness of behaviour and use of internet by youth clientele. The age-group which patronizes chatting and gaming are adolescent – young. They occupy a loosely marked social zone between childhood and adulthood and also occupy a special place in the city’s changing commercial culture. Here, we make a speculative and ideational connection between the ‘grey’ non-formality of café businesses and ‘unmonitored’ chat-room dialogues that youth indulge through these very businesses
Cyber cafes made most of their money selling internet time to young ‘gamers and chatters’. A considerable portion of income comes from these activities. We heard many café managers remark that internet publics, especially the youth, have turned ‘purposive’. They have discovered the joys of social networking, gaming, web surfing and plain and simple mailing and job search. While decoding non-formality in cyber café business practices, our ethnography made interesting connections at the client-end. It is clear, at the outset, youth in urban India are discovering the covert pleasures of internet chatting and the new high of gaming supersonic cars and terrorists. We spoke to 16 such self-confessed addicts and their on-line passions. Café regulars were 16-24 years of age, the youngest so far, in an outer suburban Mumbai café, is a 8 year old gamer who come regularly with his elder cousin. All except 4 were male. The four girls were made contact with great difficulty as is considered norm for young and female persons to avoid cyber cafés for chatting or gaming. Two of them, chat addicts, went on-line from their home PCs; one young woman of 22 was an employee in a suburban Mumbai café and got into yahoo chat with idling PCs16; The fourth was a regular gamer visiting 2 or 3 favorite cafes in South Mumbai with her group of friends17. The 11 boys were hooked to these internet practices and were regular cafe visitors and spent good money on these services. They report most of the cash came by way of pocket money from parents and other generous relatives18.
We try and glean from narratives the import of these activities in the lives of youth subjects. These were ethnographic data whose meanings were not apparent on the surface of things. They also held a tenuous link to café business practices, not always talked about, partially hidden from the public eye nevertheless playing out in public space. We report two of our chat room encounters. Sagar, 17, in high school, lives in South Mumbai. His father drives a cab and family income is around 270$US per month. He uses the Yahoo chat room while at the café, some from around 9 in the morning to evening time, when he is ‘in the mood’. He says, it not really a major part of his life, but yes “if at all I am fed up and tired then I sit to chat. I am not dependent on it. If I feel like it then. Yes there are boys who can’t stay without chatting at least once during the day”. But this conversation we had while he was chatting, tells a different tale, “Ah here is a female! One can guess immediately from the language of the person… You know, when in chat rooms you are relieved of all the tension. You feel relaxed… Feel like doing a lot of mischief…” Aadil, 21, moved from his home town to study computer engineering in Mumbai. His first internet experience was in a café to check exam results. He is an avid internet user, e mailing, Orkut, information for college projects and even looks for free downloads. But his most passionate past time is chatting at Yahoo. Beginning on a serious note about computing technologies he eventually told us his less talked about pursuits;
“I was chatting with a girl and she told me how she looked and that she was looking for someone with so and so looks. I thought that she was lying so I lied to her too. I started bragging about myself. One day we decided to meet. Instead of going personally I sent my friend ahead and watched from far…”
“Did her description of herself matched?”
“No it didn’t. So she was bragging… and she was dying to meet me… and finally it did not work out for us. There are other girls and there are 22 states in India. I want a girl-friend in each of the 22 states…”
Concluding Remarks
In conclusion, we wish to reiterate the nexus between Mumbai city, its pervasive non-formal business culture and techno-social needs inflecting the every day of cyber cafés. The pervasive nature of informality demands us to look at the emerging market discourse of IT business practices not through the discourse of illegality but informality. With regulatory discourse of information technologies centered on piracy and illegitimacy, informality of business practices in emerging economies provide an alternate premise to understand its nature and function. These challenge received notions of visualizing IT in emerging economies as simply piracy and illegality and coming to terms with markets shaped and structured by unregulated and non-formal processes in negotiating on-going and future business relationships. Several of cyber café socio-economic transactions occupy an indefinite legal status, flirting with copyright laws and appropriate internet browsing behaviour. We also point to irregularity in business infrastructure licensing and ownership. Café find ways to survive the cost and maintenance of expensive internet technology, again seeking existing non-formal business networks of Mumbai.
As we point out in the paper, cyber cafés, especially those sprouting in ‘illegal’ tenements like Dharavi and social practices like youth chatting and gaming lend a new dimension to non-formality. Cyber cafés, already suffused in non-formal/para-legal business sociality, become sites offering a certain amount of secrecy around virtual dating and flirting for young clients and economic transactions for businessmen. The scope of the paper did not allow a detailed reflection upon the affinity among young clients and cyber cafes. However our ethnography shows the ‘greyness’ of youth internet practices ironically reflecting the ‘grey’ areas of café business practices. We also point to the many instances whereby the non-formal and the illegal develop tenuous links, overlap and mute boundaries separating them, a function of the overarching shadow economy of Mumbai.
Acknowledgments – This material is based upon work supported by Microsoft Research Labs India. The author wishes to thank Kentaro Toyama, Microsoft Research Labs, Bangalore, India, Rahul Srivastava, The Research Forum, Goa, India, for valuable comments and editorial suggestions, Amit Vasudeo, Omkar Shenolikar, for field ethnography and data collection.
Dr Nimmi Rangaswamy is an Associate Researcher with Microsoft Research Labs, India. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology, 1999, from the University of Mumbai, India. She has taught graduate course at the Delhi and Mumbai Universities, 1988-1999. She was part of the editorial team for the journal, The Economic and Political Weekly, Mumbai, 2000-2001.
Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings 2007, pp. 115–127. © American Anthropological Association, some rights reserved.