NOTES

¹ We studied cafés run as small business, the mom and pop kind, not up-market chain of i-cafes run by corporate giants in India. Almost all cafes in our sample refer to these as cyber and not internet cafes. For a broader range of information on internet cafes in India, see Haseloff(2005)

² This paper speaks of outcomes from ethnographic research rather than merit ethnography as method in bringing grey data into the light of day. That will command a paper by itself.

³ Here Mumbai belongs with Bangkok, Hong Kong, Sao Paulo, Los Angeles, Mexico City, London, and Singapore, the loci of the practices of global capital. Typically, these cities are large (10–20 million people) and are currently shifting from economies of manufacture and industry to economies of trade, tourism, and finance (Appadurai 2000 )

⁴ A broader definition includes household enterprises that are own-accounted, family or non-formal employees, contract employees employed by the formal sector, casual labour and intermittent labour all of which work under varying conditions of (un) regulation. Mumbai’s non-formal economy accounts for 68% of all businesses (Agarwala 2005).

⁵ Rangaswamy (2007)

⁶ Patel (1995, 2003)

⁷ Roberts (2003)

⁸ Lele (1995 )

⁹ See Anderson (1991) for a culturalist definition of imaginary communities

¹⁰ Anywhere between 6000-20,00 INR, 150-500 $US, depending on quality and specifications demanded by a client

¹¹ http://www.airoots.org/?p=57

¹² If we take the 700,000 population figure, the population density of Dharavi would be around 314,887/km, more than Manhattan in rush hour, which is about 50,000 people/km (Dharavi, High-rise Eviction, Economic and Political weekly, June 23, pp;2364, 2007 )

¹³ Here is a list of select literature, Chatterji(2005), Sharma(2000), Desai(1995), Verma(2002) PROUD(1989), Appadurai(2000)

¹⁴ Mukhija (2002)

¹⁵ Blog spot on internet cafés, http://technolojai.blogspot.com/2007/06/internet-cafes-rockget-excited.html

¹⁶ She reluctantly gave us a brief interview and refused to discuss in detail her on-line chatting practices.

¹⁷ Female gaming needs special and separate attention to analyse gender dimensions of public and shared internet usages. We have not gone into this issue in this paper.

¹⁸ We need to probe further about who funds youth internet time.