Big success

The Delhi trip was so cool. It was all I was hoping it to be and more.

I surprise myself by how kicked I get with brushes with fame and power.

Anyway. The highlight of the trip of course was the launch of the portal at the PM's residence (7 Racecourse Road, for the ignorant). It wasn't actually at the residence residence, Racecourse Road is a big complex with a number of buildings. Anyway the cool thing was that I got to spend a signficant amount of time inside ostensibly setting up the Water Portal part of the presentation (which was actually just a html page sitting on the desktop that the PM clicked on to bring up the homepage). I was there on Thursday for a couple of hours and then again on Friday early to do some work there and then for the actual launch. By the end of it, I felt quite at home as some people were commenting, and wandering around the place on my own and unescorted. It was great fun and the high lasted for quite a while.
At the launch were, among others, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Sam Pitroda (of course, since he's the chairman of the National Knowledge Commission. The 'of course' is because the actual reason for the event was the submission of the NKC's report to the nation for 2006 and the launch of the water and energy portals was an adjunct. The NKC had asked Arghyam and TERI to do the portals so that was the initial raison d'etre of the Water Portal), Rahul Gandhi (!), Kapil Sibal (Law minister), and assorted lesser mortals.

Well, that's the initial writeup. Lots more that is blogworthy (at least by the standards of this blog!) and I'll perhaps blog some more about the trip. I've noticed though that I'm getting less enthusiastic about spewing out everything on my mind onto the blog.

BTW -- no photograpsh at all from the PMs residence for the simple reason that they don't allow you to take mobile phones and cameras (and pen drives!) into the residence.

Oh, and yeah :-) Manmohan Singh was quite nice. He looked exactly as he looks in photographps :-). He seemed very mild-mannered and delivered a not very strong speech.