I moved to India last week from the UK and am back at my family home after an absence of over 5 years. I spent the past week meeting friends at the usual haunts and new places which have sprung up. It feels very good to be back home.
On my way to India, my cousin’s family hosted me in Dubai for a couple of days and showed me around, and I had a great time there. There seems to be a staggering amount of construction work taking place. The buildings there are enormous in size. We went to various malls, restaurants, etc. and briefly stopped at the beach near Burj Al Arab. It was deep aquamarine in colour and absolutely beautiful. But I ran back inside the car as it was unbearably hot—dunno how the people on the beach managed to sit there. It may not be a democracy, and it may be in the Middle East, but Dubai is everything like a western country and more. You have all the night life, the malls, the restaurants, the infrastructure, people wear what they like, rent is low, fuel is cheap and your earnings are tax-free. I didn’t find anything bad with the place. Apparently you couldn’t own property there before, but now things are slowly changing and you can purchase property in some places (it’s expensive though).
I am happy to be near mum finally. I had not visited her for over 4 years, but this is past and I am relieved to be back. She is happy too. She bought a splendid new PC for me (which is another thing which happened in the last week) to replace my old Celeron 300 MHz with 128 MB RAM kit. The new one is a 2 GHz AM2 Athlon64 x2 with a gig of RAM, Asus mobo, spanking NVIDIA 3D card, spanking 7.1 sound card, spankin’ 5.1 speakers, a huge hard disk and widescreen display. Hubba hubba, and how those compile times will be quartered. I’m also reunited with all of my old “stuff” such as books, guitars and effect pedals, audio tapes, bike (although I’m scared to drive again going by the traffic I’ve seen so far), several old files of past work, etc. There are lots of items I can probably upload someday.
India also means lots of ants which like sinking their mandibles into everything (esp. human flesh), power cuts, atleast two types of mosquito borne fevers currently on the run, great food, heat, noise, water purifiers, people handing out free advice, … fun! Red ants seem to be gaining territory over black ants than before from what I’ve seen so far.
I’m all set to work here now. We’re connected now by BSNL DataOne broadband. I half-expected it to suck (when I left India 5 years ago, there was only dialup and it sucked). But wowie what can I say, it’s just like the connection in London. There are caps, but it doesn’t hurt work one bit. Connection time from the placement of order was 2 days. I had some trouble connecting initially due to a faulty D-Link ADSL modem (avoid the D-Link GLB-502T as PPPoE does not work on it), but the BSNL staff were head-over-heels in trying to solve my problem. I was visited by 4 people at home, and was on the phone with atleast 10 different staff (all within a few hours of reporting the problem). This probably sounds weird for India. With such good broadband, expect a lot of web-service and IT startups from India in the near future.
I’m still waiting for a shipment to arrive with the rest of my books, DVDs, etc. (6×30kg boxes) which will take another few weeks to get here, but these are not essential items.
I’m travelling again next week for about 10 days, visiting family in Chennai (Madras), Coimbatore and Thanjavur for Diwali, and because I haven’t seen them in a long time. 
This is my first vacation in over 4 years.
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