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Introducing Cyber Chaikhana

Hello everybody,

My name is Christopher Schwartz. Some of you in the neweurasia community have probably heard of me; most of you, however, have not. I am a friend of Ben’s from his early days in London, and I worked as the English language editor on neweurasia‘s predecessor website, Thinking-East. I am proud to now introduce myself as the editor for neweurasia‘s next great project, CyberChaikhana: Digital Conversations from Central Asia.

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Visit the blog here, and sign up to the Google Group here. And make sure to read the rest of this entry!

CyberChaikhana is a book that will highlight the 50-60 best posts from our network and other great blogs from and about Central Asia in 8-10 themed chapters. The output for this book will be two versions of a 200-page text, one in Russian and one in English. Alongside the articles, young photographers from the region will be prominently featured.

The ultimate aim of this project is twofold:

(1) The Russian version, sold for a symbolic fee in Central Asia, will attract more young people to expressing their points of view online. By building bridges between online and offline Central Asia, this book’s greatest contribution will be to demonstrate the power of weblogging, namely, that young Central Asians are not apathetic: they have something to say, and their turn to the Internet to express themselves is significant and part and parcel of their character as a generation.

And, (2) the English version will foster an image of Central Asia that is more interesting and complex than the typical Western media depictions of political instability and “petrol politics.” The book will demonstrate that Central Asia is a place of varied and evolving cultures and economies. The region is not lethargic about its destiny: its peoples are actively struggling to establish their place in the modern world, and to make meaningful lives for themselves.

The word for Central Asia’s ubiquitous teahouses, chaikhana, was selected because it best encapsulates the purpose of the book. As you all know from experience, the teahouse is a centre of community life in Central Asia. In the teahouse, all subjects, from politics to religion to backgammon strategy to the fashion sense of a local politician, are energetically discussed over cups of hot sugar tea. In neweurasia‘s “cyber chaihkana” our webloggers come together over keyboards rather than tea, but the results are greater in scale: whereas the traditional chaikhana is local, the Internet is a teahouse encompassing the region.

In keeping with the teahouse tradition, neweurasia will host an open-to-all weblog dedicated to the creative and editorial process of the book. The goal of this special weblog is fundamentally democratic: not only to make public the editorial process, but also to gather suggestions and insights from the neweurasia community as I proceed forward. You can connect to the weblog here.

And so, I invite you to “Choi-poi“: come join me, and together you and I will produce a book of which all of us in the neweurasia community and beond can feel proud.

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