Well, it is almost Saturday. And as we all know, Saturday is the day to party.

Anjali has handed me the (what I presume to be) final guest list, which is substantially longer than we had expected. It includes a bunch of (very) recent foreign returnees, a high power rock group (God save the neighbourhood!), an astonishing assortment of “grown ups”, and a very select bunch of close school friends. Hmmm….

Gaurav was here a while back to case the joint (again – people are still replacing the glasspanes that shattered during his last party here). Turns out that I haven’t thought of everything, which means more cables, lights, speakers, amps, mikes, mike stands, drum platforms and stuff.

Did I mention “God save the neighbourhood”?

Saturday also happens to be Gaurav’s 21st, so I hope he remembers to wear thick jeans and stuff pillows in sensitive places….

Food and drink have been ordered – we have ordered way too much as usual, so a few people will have to starve at the party. (Think that is a paradox? Think of it as a hard disk – the bigger it is, the faster it fills).

We have spent the past week looking anxiously at the sky. Even now, it is overcast, but the weather forecast seems to indicate no rain for Saturday evening. Nevertheless Plan B is in place – just in case. IAC, we are keeping fingers (and other extremities) crossed.

For those guests who cannot stay away from the net for too long – the place is entirely WiFi’d, so check in your MAC address when you arrive if you are carrying a notebook

I loooooove parties!

Well, despite earlier misgivings, I ended up at the Rolling Stones concert after all.

Earlier on Friday, we decided to postpone Anjali’s party to next week, because it looks like this weekend is going to be rained out, and quite a few people couldn’t make it to the party anyway.

Was sitting in office when Anjali calls saying that her friend had managed to get some passes for the Stones show, which I had earlier decided to skip because I didn’t have company (Mrinal had declared the Stones outside his area of interest, Gopi was too beat, etc.), and because it looked like serious rain. But since Shanu, Sony and RK had also decided to go, I trundled over to Palace Ground to check out the action.

The show was great. Even though it rained cats and dogs, everyone stayed and enjoyed themselves, and the Stones, seeing the enthu from the crowd, gave their best.

Because we weren’t right up front, I had resigned myself to squinting (in the rain) at the distant stage, though the sound was passable. To my delight, during the third number, the back of the stage suddenly lit up with a *huge* plasma display, with *excellent* live video coverage of the show – including from a “stump vision” camera from Ronnie Wood’s guitar headstock! This made things so much easier for me and others at the back – we didn’t miss a thing.

I am used to seeing stacks of speakers on each side of the stage for such shows, but this one was different – just one slim column of speakers strung up like a ribbon from a frame. Despite the unimpressive looks, this speaker arrangement (obviously state of the art) pumped out louder and clearer sound than any of the shows I had seen earlier.

Lights and screen-projections were very impressive as well – the rapidly changing lights ensure an almost live-MTV feel to the show, which made it all the more impressive.

This was Anjali’s first ever rock show, and she appeared to have enjoyed herself, even though she and her friend Sweety got hopelessly soaked in the bargain.

By the time the Stones played “Satisfaction” and “Jumping Jack Flash”, most people had decided that this was most definitely a “paisa vasool” (money’s worth) event. I am glad I went – this was almost certainly my last chance to see the Rolling Stones live – and unlike most DNA Networks organised shows, this one had almost zero glitches (other than the rain).

After a 20 minute hunt for my car (because I couldn’t remember where I had parked it), we had to face the usual traffic jam, which kept us immobile for almost 45 minutes. Being soaked to the skin, this would have been a most unpleasant experience, but since my Fiat Siena has an *excellent* heater system, we were all warm and toasty in no time.

We came home to a power-failure, but the ordered-in Chinese food made up for that. There is *nothing* like a Hot & Sour Chicken soup when you are seriously soaked!

Crashed out early after reflecting briefly that while Mick Jagger may have wailed that he don’t get no satisfaction, I was as content as a pig in the mud. Literally!

Today was a holiday, so got bored stiff. Managed to survive most of the day, with some battles with VSNL, Redhat and assorted service providers.

Finally snapped, grabbed Sony and Shanu, and headed for town.

Habitat was closed, so no DVDs to be had. Planet M was a disaster zone – playing Rolling Stones and Kannada music. Didn’t find anything I liked, but had to wait there since Khader was supposed to join us, and he kept saying “I am stuck in the rain”. Turns out he wasn’t really, and we realised we were wasting our time, and headed for dinner at Kohinoor. Great pepper chicken and Kerala Paratha. Amazing, but after all these years, Kohinoor continues to rock food-wise.

Later headed for Coffee Day on Lavelle Road, where we had great coffee, and were duely wifi radiated.

Red Hat Linux 9 rocks. They finally got the network profiles business right, and of course native support for the infamous 845 motherboards (which includes my notebook), plus lots of other good stuff that only a system admin can really appreciate. Will put up a decent writeup over the weekend.

Small victory for me, more of a sentimental thing than anything else, but as of 31-Mar-2003, the domains COMversations.com and COMversations.net are finally mine!

Someone had registered them many years ago, before it struck me that there was some brandvalue for these names.

Well, looks like he either forgot to renew them this year, or just gave up on being able to sell them, but I grabbed them, and won’t let them go.

For those of you who don’t know why these domains are so important to me – “COMversations” was the name of my column in PCQuest from January 1993 to December 1996. Some of those articles you can see here.

Now let me see what I can do with them. Maybe I should start writing again, but then PCQuest isn’t a platform I can see myself on any more. Dataquest is too corporate and policy oriented. And Computers@Home caters to an audience that doesn’t dig deep tech.

Maybe some other publication would be interested in my style of writing and the kind of topics I like addressing.

We will see.

Today is my daughter Geetanjali’s 13th birthday. She is officially a teenager today.

Another era passes by. Sure, being 13 doesn’t give her the car keys or a right to vote (or even the right to decide what we watch on TV on Wednesdays at 9pm ), but it does bring about two fundamental changes:

First of all, it makes me feel older. 13 years ago, I was 28 and broke. I had to borrow Rs.200 from my bank manager to go buy sweets to distribute to people to celebrate Anjali’s birth. It was just a little over 10 years after ABBA sang “what lies waiting down the line, at the end of 89″, and the future – the whole 21st century thing – still had a sense of delicious mystery about it. Today, I am the years into the fabled 21st century, and I still don’t see people flying around using jetpacks. And there is still a Bush fire burning.

Secondly, it makes Anjali feel older. Is that good? Will it raise her level of awareness about responsibilities? Will it make her think and act like an adult, or will she be just another air-headed teenager, mooning over paper images of Sharukh Khan (like her mother does ?

Time will tell, I guess. One change I have already seen – instead of asking for the typical kiddy party, she wants a party (to take place after her exams finish – she has Maths tomorrow, and exams go on the whole week) that is pretty unlike what Shubha expected Anjali would ask for. Actually the kind of party *I* would enjoy, complete with an award winning, competition-busting rock band in attendance, not because someone paid through his nose to get them, but because they are actually, really, truly and honestly Anjali’s friends!

Now how many “kids” in *your* neighbourhood can boast of that?

Yay!

Sadly, certain in-DUH-viduals will be missing a great party – for them, there will be pictures to see and tales to listen to.

But for the rest of the gang – let’s party, dudes! The offspring is a teenager! She doesn’t have a license to drive, but she *does* have a license to party!

This war gives me nightmares. Both the USA and UK have abandoned the “liberation” charade and are clearly focussing on the main objectives – the Iraqi oil fields.

Just now, I watched a live interview on BBC with some guy who asked a very valid question – why are the Americans bombing the Iraqi palace and other historical sites, when Saddam Hussain and his commanders very clearly aren’t there?

I really don’t care if Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. That is unproven, and even if they are “discovered” during this campaign (something I would question with greatest intensity – how do we know that they weren’t placed there by the US/UK forces to prove a point?), there is no proof that Saddam was planning to use them (or had planned to in the last 12 years).

What *is* proven, however, is the fact that the USA *does* have weapons of mass destruction, and their foremost war-monger, George Bush himself, has clearly stated that they wouldn’t hesitate to use them.

I am scared, and I am not ashamed to say so. I have been a bully for most of my life, and I know how easy it is to “extend” justification to achieve something. What stops the USA (which has, in the past 18 months, annexed two sovereign states) from attacking my homeland some time in the future, if it feels that there is something to gain from that?

Right now, the USA is annexing Iraq because it has something the USA wants – 66% of the available oil reserves.

Tomorrow, what stops George Bush (or rather – one of his successors, since he isn’t going last very long – remember that no war-monger president of the USA has ever won a re-election in the past century or so) from annexing India, because India has the world’s largest pool of English speaking, technically competent engineers? The American software industry would collapse in days without India’s software brains. That is more than enough justification, right?

Call me paranoid, call me unrealistic, call me a US-basher, call me what you want. But what I am seeing here, unfolding before me, is the end of civilization as we knew it.

Never before has a single country (including, ironically, Iraq) ever managed to garner so much scorn and outrage from its own citizens and the rest of the world as the USA has now managed to.

And forget everything else, when United States Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld finally goes on the air, what does he plead? “Please don’t put your oil wells on fire”.

Right. Priorities.

This isn’t war – this is the systematic extermination of undesirable elements (read – native Iraqis) from areas of commercial interest to the USA (read – oil fields), using state-of-the-art weapons.

The last time this was done, it was by Hitler, to the Jews, to get at their banking and financial assets – using gas chambers.

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

–Oscar Wilde

While some people mock the upcoming US war on Iraq, many people miss the real importance of this war.

History shows that the Vietnam war fought by the USA in the 20th century was without any doubt a war the USA lost, and lost miserably. In an attempt to impose their own line of thinking on the Vietnamese people (communist or not), America fought a pointless war that killed thousands of Americans, even more Vietnamese, and achieved nothing at all.

The Iraq war that Bush and Blair are about to unleash on the world is a war the USA and Britain have already lost – long before the first high tech American weapon is fired. Because while Iraq will without doubt be destroyed in this war, the real victims will be the Americans and British. International relations between these two island nations and the rest of the planet are going to be set back two centuries, and the balance of power – earlier maintained jointly by might and diplomacy – will now tilt in the direction of the rest of the world. Like it or not, the USA and Britain need the rest of the world to survive – and they are about to ensure that the world will never trust them again.

All this because two heads of state failed to understand a simple fact – they are the heads of state of their own countries – not of any other. Their rights to interfere in other countries’ internal affairs (in the guise of unproven claims of Iraq’s aggression towards other countries) are limited to diplomacy – waging war, that too against a country as backward as Iraq, is unforgivable in this day and age.

Evidently, neither the USA nor Britain have been able to overcome their colonial past – and in both cases, they will pay a terrible price for this.

Tony Blair’s political career is effectively over, while George Bush will need a stupendous win (and use of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons by Iraq) to win the next election – a win that is historically, logistically and practically impossible to achieve. His father’s political career did not survive the last war, but at least he still had a face to show.

The son, however, stands to lose more than just an election – no president of the United States has ever stood before a war crimes tribunal, but even at this point, George Bush has done enough harm to the United Nations and the world to answer to a lot more than just a few casual questions of presidential misconduct. He now risks as going down in history books as the president who managed to upstage Richard Nixon as the most reviled American president ever.

And even before the first shot is fired (and unless he is stupid enough to reveal and/or use weapons of mass destruction), Saddam Hussain will go down a martyr, forever to be held up as an example of a victim of America’s colonial ambitions and unbelievable greed.

What utter irony – the land of the free v/s freedom.

OK, this update is due, so I am jamming it in:

• I finally bought a new notebook – it is a IBM Thinkpad T30 Model 92A. Muchos gracias to all the people involved who helped with the final decision and acquisition.
• My home is now fully wifi’d. I can wirelessly connect to the home LAN and from there to the Internet from anywhere in the compound or building. Very useful, given the fact that my new notebook has built-in wireless networking. My dream of being able to sit in the garden, working on my notebook while connected to the Internet has finally come true. And
• Close on the heels of sister-in-law Arati announcement of a second bun in the oven , we decided that Judo needed company – resulting in our adoption of his son Nicky. The pup quickly took over the house – some photos here.

• Shubha and I had a little holiday/honeymoon in Goa at the tail end of my Goa talk tour. Unfortunately I cannot let out too much, except that we ate and drank like the world was coming to an end, saw lots of sunsets on the beach, and had a great time. Some selected (read “censored”) photos here.

Sorry about no updates. Whenever I run into massive issues with something, I tend to fall behind with diary updates.

Please bear with me – hopefully I will be able to get over this mountain soon.