Your online mohalla

@RANDOM

Think of the Internet as the world's largest mohalla, stroll around the neighbourhood a bit, and you get interesting reflections of public spaces in India.

Consider this a starter guide "" it's easy to build your own "neighbourhood" with a few Google and blog searches.

Hundreds of dedicated sites cover cities like Delhi, Bombay and Bangalore. But one of the friendliest websites is at Auroville, which packs in a visual tour, a history of Pondicherry and tips for those who want to visit the famous Matrimandir.

Auroville: http://www.auroville.org
We haven't done enough to showcase our monuments and heritage buildings. I looked for user-friendly, comprehensive guides to Indian monuments, but found scattershot websites, each of which covered one aspect or another.

Despite the overdose of sponsored links, the Taj Mahal virtual tour (http://www.taj-mahal.net/) is incredibly detailed. Kamat's Potpourri has a comprehensive page on Indian monuments (http://www.kamat.com/indica/monuments/).

One of the best organised sites is Templenet, where you can browse the 2,000 entries in the Temple Encyclopaedia, search shrines by specific gods (Shiva or Shakti?) or "reflect on the Indian concept of time".

Templenet: http://www.templenet.com/
India inspires travelogues but few really imaginative sites. There's far more on Pakistani truck art, for example, than on Indian truck art.

One exception is the Indian Autorickshaw Race site, which started out to promote a truly lunatic three-wheeler race, and has now sprouted rather beautiful photogalleries, and addictive autorickshaw news.

Indian Autorickshaws: http://www.indianarc.com/iarc_blog.php
What makes one kind of home legal and another illegal? In the wake of slum demolitions in Bombay and Delhi, several groups challenge our idea of slums as eyesores.

At http://dupb.blogspot.com/, the demolition of many of Bombay's slums during 2004-05 is documented; in P Sainath's words: "How agonised we are about how people die.

How untroubled we are by how they live." Robert Neuwirth, a writer who spent two years living in squatter communities in four continents, documents the vibrant energy of these "misunderstood" settlements at http://www.pkblogs.com/squattercity.

Documenting Nangla Maachi: http://nangla.freeflux.net/
At places like Open Space India (http://openspaceindia.org) and Sarai (www.sarai.net), a new urban dialogue has started.

Sarai has room for everything from academic discourses to "cyber-mohalla" experiments. Open Space covers the politics of what women wear to college, offers art workshops, debates on alternate sexualities, and has a growing section on Indian poetry.

But one of the most interesting urban projects on the Net is Jasmeen's Blank Noise Project. It challenges the Indian tolerance for "eve-teasing" "" "no touching, no leching, no staring, no groping", it says bluntly "" and runs several interventions, including a version of the famous Take Back the Night events.

Blank Noise Project: http://blanknoiseproject.blogspot.com/
No Indian urban tour would be complete unless you had an idea of where not to commit nuisance.

An old India hand takes a nostalgic look at "Bathrooms I have known" (http://www.namasteindiatours.com/electricshower.htm), from the one in Bundi where you can shower as you sit on the toilet to the ubiquity of the resident loo lizard.

For the uninitiated, Jesse A Todhunter offers a hilariously illustrated step-by-step guide (http://www.pbase.com/jtodhunter/indian_toilet) to using the Indian squat toilet. Only Sulabh Shauchalya would think, however, of creating an online Toilet Museum, which covers the evolution of the Indian toilet and offers useful tips.

"Before going for defecation one was to chant the following mantra from Narad Puran: "Gachhantu Rishio Deva/ Pishacha ye cha grihya ka/ Pitrbhutagana surve/Karishye Malamochanam". Unmissable.

Sulabh Toilet Museum: http://www.sulabhtoiletmuseum.org/