We can use mobile phones to reach anyone, anywhere, at any time.
Will connectedness eventually make everywhere in the world the same?
Or does the character of local people and places turn technological networks into unique personal networks?
To find out, poet Ann Sansom visited Shaheed Baba Khushal Singh Secondary School in Lambra, Punjab, India, to run creative writing workshops with teachers and students, then Ann and poet Shamshad Khan went to Abraham Moss and Cedar Mount high schools in Manchester.
At the three schools they asked teachers and students to write poems about the places and things that matter to them in their neighbourhoods.
IN THE SKY
I ate ice-cream made by clouds,
chapattis made by the sun.
Ice looks like cotton,
and the fields like bed sheets.
Inderpreet Kaur
MY VILLAGE
is Kang Sahbu.
I pass my childhood in it.
Old people are like
the banyan tree in it.
Gurjit Singh
REMEMBRANCE
Flowers wishing in the wind.
Wind chimes. Teddy bears.
Mud squelching. Quietness.
Stones banging. Leaves crisping.
Nathan Foster
THE BACK
where I play football, wrestling,
the place I know well,
especially the hiding places.
I can't climb the big tree
but the small one is easy.
Mohammed Rahimi
Rather than in a book, these poems have been published on a new mobile phone service using text messages.
Readers in both the UK and India, carrying their mobile phones, can read the students’ poems while they are in the places described, as well as comparing them to poems about similar places in the other country.
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