Going borderless with The Mumbai Portal ahead of the Mumbai Marathon

Inside Azad Maidan, a cricket match is going on to my left and a life-size, curious looking golden box is to my right, its façade depicting the spirit of running and inclusiveness, tastefully painted by artists Ajinkya Sutar, Sanskar Sawant, Rakesh Kadam and Raja Javir. 

This box is the Mumbai Portal, an SCMM initiative created by Chlorophyll Innovation Lab in partnership with Shared Studio that transforms recycled shipping containers into hubs for unique interactions. Once you walk into a portal you can have live, virtual, full-body, face-to-face conversations with people from distant parts of the world.

While the portal doesn't have direct connect to running, Procam International’s CEO, Dilip Jayaram tells me, “It goes with the larger idea of human spirit and pushing the boundaries that Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon has come to represent.”

As I enter inside the windowless container, there's a screen in front of me like the ones you see at cinemas and what I see is a man shifting awkwardly before we dive into conversation. I'm at a loss of how to start as well because I neither know his name nor the country he belongs to. Turns out, I’ve been connected to Palestine. 

But before we commence, five college students, young men in western formals and women sporting denims and hijabs join him. And guess what? Even these youngsters only know us through Bollywood. “Is everyone in India a born dancer?” asks Naja, a literature student with completely straight face and as I clear that misconception, others fire questions about Holi, whether Indians’ like Arabic music, and so on. They don’t believe I enjoy it until I bring up Arabic pop singer Nancy Arjam, whose mention has them splitting in excited giggles. Their quizzing makes me realise what it’s like to be on the other side of journalists. By now, I've made peace with the fact that sometimes they don't seem like they looking at you directly, possibly thanks to the camera angle, and yet I feel like they’re just a touch away. What I like is that there's almost no time lapse when we are talking, like I generally experience when using Skype or Viber. Later, Jake Levin of Shared Studios explains that the lack of a curvature in this screen unlike that of other virtual interaction platforms and this screen's full-length is what enables the immersive experience. And we're back to Bollywood, the lady in charge/curator at the Palestinian end is keen to get everyone to share their favourite stars and SRK, Kareena Kapoor and Katrina Kaif are the first names that slip their lips.

Equally curious to know about their lives, I ask them what they think of Susan Abulhawa, known for her novels on Palestine, they've heard of her, but haven't read her books and the mention of media saddens them. “The reality is very different, people think we are the ones who kill,” exclaims one chap. The curator pipes in, “the media doesn’t remember us unless we’re under attack, so people feel we’re always in a state of war, but as you can see our youth beautiful, well-educated, full of hope and energy” and “we go to restaurants, hang out, browse the Internet, dig the play station and try to achieve goals like kids in the rest of the world,” adds someone else. They are glad such initiatives give them “opportunities for cultural exchange that allows us to explore the world and them to know us for who we are rather than what the media projects” says a young girl who’s recently launched a hair-oil website.

Thanks to power outage on the Palestinian end and some well-known people waiting in queue, my time is up, albeit prematurely. But it’s amazing to have spoken to youngsters from a country I can only imagine travelling to. While you may not know whom you will be talking to, at the back end, at the beginning of each month, a network coordinator schedules interactions between countries based on time zones. The Mumbai Portal will connect visitors to 20 portals, including Chicago, Los Angeles, refugee camps in Berlin, Gaza, Erbil (Iraq) & Amman, Art centres in Rwanda, Yangon and Mexico City. It seems like these portals are finally going to help realise the dream of a borderless world that the Internet and then social media had set out to do.