The Energy and Resources Group is proud to announce the launch of the new ERG website. The new website is a product of many months of work by a team of dedicated individuals at ERG, CNR and beyond.

You can visit the site here: http://erg.berkeley.edu/

Feel free to share encouraging comments on the ERG Facebook Page or by tweeting to @ERGBerkeley. Please do "like" the Facebook page for regular updates.

For any other queries or suggestions about the website, please contact: ergdeskb@berkeley.edu

Thank you to all who have contributed to this endeavor. Special thanks to Kay Burns, Sandra Dovali, Isha Ray, Diego Ponce de Leon Barido, Jess Goddard, Ian Umeda (designer), Gary Casterline & Joe Bunik (CNR), Harrison Fraker & the ERG Faculty, Jess Reilly, and Marco Paliza-carre.

And as ERG student, Diego, has added: Thanks also to those ERGies who in the past attempted to make this happen, but the circumstances didn't allow them to see it through. It is because of your previous efforts that we have succeeded today!

Best,

The ERG Website Committee

P.S. Further development of ERG Alumni section is in the works. Please look for updates in the near future.

By Zubair A. Dar 

Last week, I went down the timeline on Facebook to check my first post ever. The three words I wrote to describe my feelings read ‘waiting for azadi’. Freedom in Urdu, azadi has come to signify the sum total of aspirations of millions of people in my homeland, Kashmir, a valley perched up in the western Himalayas near India and Pakistan. In my second post, I spell out some of these aspirations as freedom from ‘curfew, atrocities and gags on freedom of speech’.

I vividly remember the days. It was the summer of 2008. We had been constrained indoors for many days in the capital, Srinagar, placed under strict curfew after widespread protests and mass gatherings. As journalists, my friends and I could do little other than make phone calls and surf the Internet for information. Venturing out to gather eyewitness accounts was synonymous with risking your life. Authorities cancelled and reissued curfew passes to us as restrictions continued for weeks. Every day, we would hear of deaths and damages to property by armed forces. Outside the first floor apartment, we would often see troopers thrashing civilians who left their homes to buy bread, milk and other essentials. The gag was choking life in many different ways – crushing dissent, preventing information exchange and breaking the backs of people by limiting access to food and essential medicine.

It was during these strangulating days that I opened a Facebook account. As New Delhi decided to continue the policy of barring text messages and confiscating newspapers, Facebook became the space to express, to communicate, to show and to expose. It was a space that cut through vertical communication structures and established a horizontal network of the people, by the people and for the people. In conflict zones and occupied territories, it proved to be the carnival where people would act vile for a day to challenge the authority of the ruler. But Facebook has since died a death many will mourn for long time to come.

Ever since I landed in the US this summer, Facebook has come to scare me. My home page looks like a psychoanalysis report. It is a reflection of everything I have looked for in the market, searched in Google or bought from an online store. Be it the furniture I like, the boots I am planning to buy, or books of my favourite genre, all make an appearance here – as if winking at me to tell me ‘we know what you did all summer’. Facebook is no longer the space I once knew it to be. It has changed, and so has every website that once inspired me.

It is sad how a democratising tool like the Internet and social media is continuously becoming a tool for capitalist accumulation. It is painful to accept that we can sometimes be fooled into believing that democracy has breathed a fresh life, for all we witness is a gasp that keeps democracy alive. It can never be confused with the triumph of democracy, with azadi, with freedom.