As a buzurg, i.e., someone who has been around in the infancy of what is now know generically as "blogging" - my first "post" was over at Diaryland, on 2001-10-10 @ 18:37; Blogger then was still an independent startup in beta; I also have a year's worth of Dairyland archives on Blogger but I think it is best not to release such self-conscious, mostly angst-y, yet much more hopeful jottings/droppings upon the world - I was wondering if I should throw my hat into the ring for Zigzackly's contest for the first Indian blogger?

This, however, brings up a fundamental question for Zigzackly: how to decide if something in the dark ages is a "blog"? Does it have to be paginated, and have the dated log format popularized by Blogger? What if someone then, instead of bothering to mimic a dairy, simply kept a webpage based on themes (or what we now know as tags)? Will it qualify as a blog?

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As a skeptic, I am doubtful of fads & revolutions, including this blogging revolution (while I admit on this issue, my views are more tempered and qualified) that seem to periodically show up, mainly because for me the point hinges on quality. And on that measure, most blogs, including this one, are makeshift at best. This is what I was trying to discuss with a very literate friend - he sees little or no value in reading blogs compared to reading a book - a few weeks ago.

I proposed to him that he might see the value of blogs if he viewed them a collective ongoing gossipy conversation. While blogs may or perhaps don't care to discuss ideas at the depth as a book does or can (A statistical aside: what is the average length/word count of a blog post? I suspect it is around 200-500 words, i.e., roughly half a typed page), they are neverthless very useful in the hyper textual sense, i.e., they enable us to discover and form mental maps; mental maps that can be thought of as snapshots of the collective golbal mind. Of course, it did help that we now have some very superlative literary blogs (eg: The Middle Stage) to which I was able to point him to to examine their value for himself. Since he wants morph into a writer, I also told him that yakking imperfectly on a blog is as good as asking a circle of semi-strangers (who usually become friends) to read and critique his work.

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Blog celebrity, and the correspondih envy, is another recent (in most part, main stream media generated) odious phenomenon - I am all for serious hobbyists for whom play remains play. And thanks to programs such as Google's Ad-sense, some of these celebrity bloggers can now make a living off their blogging. Aside: I for one prefer to call is Ad-Nonsense; I semi-loathe blogs that feature this brand of textual clutter floating around, and like Doc. Sarvis in Edward Abbey's "The Monkey Wrench Gang", I feel like taking a blowtorch to them - maybe this would be a worthy Firefox add-in; one that serves up webpages sans Ad-nonsense.

Why you ask? I feel such commercial concerns take away from the feeling of community (even though Wendelly Berry would mock me for using the word community to refer to 'people' so geographically dispersed) that can be engendered by blogs. I don't mind people receiving financial benefits if they produce something that other people find value in but I rather not see them getting these benifits from an faceless corporation. So what kind of reward model do I want to see in place? That, kind reader, is a topic for another rambling post :)

Today after many days I found myself asking this question what does it mean to go home? And I write these words as meditations on that thought. Home for me today is a place of fiction. An imaginary state of mind I once knew, maybe, for a fleeting period of time. Is this place where I sit and write this, home?? Is this room with it's jumble of books on the floor, Van Gogh on the wall, guitar leaning against the wall waiting to be played, snapshots of Washington DC in a frame capturing the mood of a few very happy moments, is this space where I sit and look out of the window at the late dimming daylight home?? I know not and in this very crevice of doubt, I can only very obliquely sense and say that this perhaps at best is a place that provides a temporary place of rest, a roof up against the soon to be cold night. So where is home for me? Is it across the oceans a million miles from here? But before I claim that to be so, I find myself acknowledging to having made a break from that place, that house of my parents, probably when I left it to go to Kgp. And in all the journeys back on vacations from college I found it receding farther away, with changes that were probably too swift for me to comprehend or adjust too.

When I was a kid, that home of my parents was in a place that could still claim to be rural, in fact it was officially classified to be a Panchayath, a term that denotes governance for a village. And from the roof of my house I could see rice fields in the distance, emerald green in the rainy season when I used to get up there, to fly kites, around this time of the year. And beyond them were mango orchards. And I could watch my kite drifting high above all those trees in the distance. And in summers I along with kids in the neighborhood , used to race out to the places where the streets ended and the srcub began. And gather dry twigs and pieces of old newspaper watched by ginkos and chameleons for the evening bonfire. That was something out of Tolkien's The Lord Of Rings, a small private cliché.

And that house was then home, where we ate dinner while sitting out in the lawn that lasted till sleep stole over us, with TV playing the single channel in black and white, on the porch. Fundamentally I guess it was an age of innocence, maybe childhoods have to be thus, clear and iridescent, sans all the desperation the slow cynicism that comes upon that child as he grows old into a adult. But the wheel of time stops for none. And I am just another human being trundling along.

So around that house, soon those empty lots started filling up with houses, initially just in the vicinity. Then over the period of times, the scrub beyond the edges of the streets was cleared and the surveyors drew their measured straight lines and more houses were built. This time a couple of stories high, apartment complexes. Later so fell the rice fields, the mango orchards and the wild custard apple trees. And the roof top started becoming a less welcoming place to be on a evening time, the scope of the view reduced. Thus it so happened that the grains of sand that define and delineate what constitute a home in my mind started to shift, into this new state of no definition.

Those childhood chums of mine drifted away too, academics claimed me, and them the various pressures of adolescence devoured. One now fixes cars for a living; another is a machinist, trades that would classify them as workers, the proletariat. While I moved skipping ahead, moved up into the ranks of the intellectuals into the paradigm of thought workers, though a recent volunteer wall painting expedition has been making me rethink these narrow definitions of work. And the garment of home around that house in that far away city was chipped away farther still.

Finally Kgp happened. And Kgp was the rite of passage from an uneasy adolescence to adulthood. And for four glorious years that place was a wonderful home, even though when I was there I couldn't wait to go out, burst out like a butterfly into the sheer wide world, a profusion of color from a cocoon. And now out of that place I realize how much I miss that cocoon. And as I was leaving that place, I fell in love, feel uncomfortable using that phrase today and new visions possessed me, for what I thought would be a home that I wanted to design and build myself, for I have a basic engineering degree in Civil Engineering, for ourselves and all those other hidden selves within us that are yet to come. And when the things came apart at the seams with a force I couldn't predict nor control, those visions had to be buried in the graveyard of memories, so that I can continue to breathe and perhaps live again. Now I sit here, in the now dark room, I didn't even realize how soon night came upon me and think about a home, and gaze at the azure thoughts drifting across the mind and write this prayer for everyone.

May the eyes that await, the vision of ever fresh old objects and places, see them soon again, smell the easy smells of old musty rooms and the aromas of a dish cooking in the kitchen, hear dogs barking at the gate, the voices of ones we love, pa and ma, our children, born and unborn, our bothers and our friends talking and greeting us at the steps, may these come to all the travelers and nomads, in time and space, waiting and pining for home.

happy with our latest arms supplier, Israel, for "effing" up in Lebanon with the same advanced "battle-tested" airforce systems they had sold us for a couple of billion dollars, if this Reuters analysis on the Israeli arms market is true. To quote:

"We are talking about the holy grail of future combat, and Israel did a great job of building sophisticated, world-leading systems based on the understanding they were born in battle," said Robert Hewson, editor of Jane's Air-Launched Weapons. "This is certainly going to make people question the salesmen a bit more, because it appears that in the hour of need this stuff is not working as advertised," he said.

Barbara Opall-Rome of the Defense News journal predicted upsets to Israel's major export deals, including a recent multibillion-dollar package ordered by its top client, India. She described Israel as one of a club of militarily advanced countries whose air forces take pride of place in war planning. "Air power enthusiasts will be licking their wounds and they will surely have to go back and revise their arguments," she said. "I'm sure there will be a lot more humility now."

Does Israel, like the retail stores, have a returns policy? Oy Ehud et al., pliss be taking all of these weapons-shemapons back, and be sending some of the agro technology you got to Vidharbha.