This morning, I attended friend Samyeer Metrani’s daughter’s naming ceremony, which happened at the Ashraya International Hotel on Infantry Road in Bangalore.

Great food, and it was good to meet a lot of old friends whom one had not seen for many years.

At some point, I found myself in the hall down there, right at the end, and I turned around, and found myself swallowing a giant lump in my throat.

This was where the Bangalore Linux User Group used to meet from 1998, until a little more than a year ago.

I closed my eyes, and I could “see” my old friends and fellow BLUGgies sitting in chairs scattered around the hall, chatting in an animated fashion.

There in a corner stood Madhu, cracking up everyone around him with some advocacy tale from college or some event. His favourite was the story of the two Sardars who stood near him at IT.COM 99, smiling patronisingly as they watched him run Windows on his machine – until he hit a key and they realised that it was Windows running as a task under Linux. As he put it – “the loudest sound was that of their jaws hitting the floor”.

Towering over everyone else, there stood Kalyan, totally soaking in the bonhomie and the cameradie as people around him hatched plans to get more students into the fold.

Standing at the door stood Jessie – she without whom nothing could ever happen – relentless ensuring that the hotel served up only the best food available, while ruthlessly negotiating with them to keep the costs down for everyone.

And scattered around the room were Shanu, Sony, Surjo, Mahendra, Kartik, Nikhil, Sushanth, Gopi, Mrinal, Kishore, Samyeer, Hanish, Harsha, Biju, Kalakrishnan, Avinash, Guru Bhat, Khader, Naim, KD, Vaibhav, Jace and so many other familiar faces, who all worked together for so many years to get people to understand what Linux and FOSS was all about, and get people to use it – while at the same time having an outrageously good time.

It was a time when we were breaking down technical walls. I remember the crowd reaction when Khader demonstrated X running on a Sis 6215c in FB mode. Or when we all brought digital cameras to the meet and figured out how to use them with Linux. Mrinal doing music composition under Linux, and Shanu editing a movie. All things that people said couldnt be done under Linux, and there we were, doing it.

Those were the days when the only question that ever came up when we hatched an outrageous advocacy plan was “when do we start?”.

The days when we sat and brainstormed about getting some Linux presence into IT.COM – only to have the IT Secretary of Karnataka stand up at the back of the hall and ask us what we needed to make it happen. When we said “a stall would be nice”, he gave us a pavillion, one that the Times of India would later refer to as “the crown jewel of IT.COM”.

Yes, the Ashraya holds some great memories for me. Memories of a revolution, and memories of a community.

God, how I miss those days.