It is amazing how things happen sometimes. Just a couple of weeks ago, out of the blue, I received mail from Tony, the subject matter saying "A world-wide journalling project". It was sandwiched between two "get-rich" spams and I almost deleted the message thinking that too was in a similar vein. Something stopped me from deleting it just then - I don't know what it was, but whatever it was, thank God! This was just before bedtime and I was pretty groggy, so I went through the message the next morning. I checked out the World-Year Site as well as many of the other sites (Fiona's, Victoria's, Elizabeth's and Tony's) and was excited at being asked to participate.

I am supposed to be from a "conflict" country. Tony actually said something like "it will be interesting to have you considering the developments in neighboring Pakistan." What surprised me was that he had actually heard of Pakistan, forget about knowing about the ongoing conflict there. Why was I surprised? An apocryphal story that keeps going around is about this exchange student who went to a small town in South Dakota. The day she arrived, her hostess, in all innocence and enthusiasm told her that they were taking her for a big treat that evening. The Indian student asked, "Where?" The lady said, "To a place where you get a wonderful food item, which is sweet, soft and delicious". Wondering whether it was some special, local dessert, she asked, "What is it called?" The hostess said, "Ice-cream." Or the time, during my stay in the US, when someone asked me how we deal with the elephant traffic on the roads. I was in such a bad mood anyway that day that I told him, "It's not the elephants who create the traffic, but the guys who are supposed to tag behind them picking up their droppings who hold up traffic. The worst problem is not even the traffic, but finding adequate parking and taking care of the elephant garage." It took him quite some time to see through the whole thing.

The conflict is not just within the country; it is also in terms of how people from other parts of the world see us. I am not sure whether I will consciously bring up "conflict" topics all the time, but I guess, as Tony's FAQ mentions, that the writings themselves will inherently reflect them.

I haven't been writing for too long in my present avatar. I used to write a lot in high school and junior college, but when I entered medicine, everything stopped. After a long hiatus, during which I was busy learning radiology and establishing myself in practice, I finally decided a few months ago that enough was enough, and started writing. I couldn't discipline myself to write regularly, so I put up the website hoping it would force me to write regularly, especially once I would have a notify/mailing list. This seems to have worked, and here I am.

I have been in touch with Nancy over the last couple of weeks and I am really looking forward to the pairing. It should be fun.

A bit more of me, myself and my surroundings.

I live in Mumbai, the capital city of the state of Maharashtra, which is one of 26 states in India. Mumbai is huge, with a population of around 14 million or so. There are people everywhere. Sixty percent live in slums and shanties.

Mumbai used to be called, Bombay, until about three-four years ago, a party called the Shiv-Sena, which had got itself elected on a populist plank converted it to Mumbai. Mumbai has always been the colloquial, local, vernacular name for Bombay - in fact schizophrenically when I talked about the city in English, I would used 'Bombay', but in Gujarati (my mother tongue), I would use Mumbai. It wasn't much of a transition for most of us when the change happened, though the elitist and intellectual crowd did lament the passing away of the internationally recognized name. The only people who really benefited from this change were the printers - amazing amounts of new stationery had to be printed overnight.

The city is peculiarly shaped. It is a linear, island city, oriented north south with a transverse breadth of only around 8-10 kilometers. Most of the businesses and up-scale, residential areas are in South Mumbai - most of the employees and workers live in North Mumbai and the suburbs. In the mornings, about 2-3 million people travel from North to South and in the evenings an equal number moves in the other direction. Though successive governments have tried to move markets and businesses away from South Mumbai, the response has been very slow and whatever benefit might have accrued from one move is usually lost by the concomitant increase in the population in that period of time.

I can't imaging staying in any other part of the country.

We are a country of festivals.

Last week we celebrated "Diwali", the festival of lights. Most people I knew used this occasion to run away for a holiday. Diwali was on Sunday, the Gujarati New Year on Tuesday and "Bhai Beej" (celebration of the brother, where the sister calls the brother for lunch/dinner and celebrates the fact that she has a brother to protect her, etc) was on Wednesday. Friday afternoon to Wednesday night was thus, a long holiday. I was stuck though, because my colleague has disappeared to the US for a fellowship and my wife is six months pregnant with twins and under house arrest. Diwali was a good day though because my seven-day old nephew came back from the hospital where he had been admitted four hours after the birth for transient tachypnea of the newborn, a respiratory problem that sometimes occurs in neonates.

Diwali celebrates the day when Rama (a God King) came back to his city, Ayodhya, after having killed the evil Ravana. It is also a day of welcoming Lakshmi, the Goddess of Wealth into our houses and offices. Upto five-six years ago, when most small businesses had their accounting years from Diwali to Diwali, the Diwali day was a day for "pooja" (prayers and hymns and rituals) in the offices. The first pages of the new office account books would be inscribed with a prayer using red ink and quills. A government mandate uniformly converting the accounting year from April to March and the advent of computers, which have destroyed the use of manual account books, have together reduced the number of offices performing pooja to less than 10%.

Diwali time is also firecracker bursting time. The louder, the better. The most popular are ground-crackers and bombs, followed by the light producing ones such as rockets and fountains. This year though, under pressure from environmental groups, the Mumbai Municipal Corporation and the police restricted the hours of cracker bursting from 6PM to 11AM, which was apparently quite a relief for those whose lives are aggravated by the noise.

The next week is going to be crazy with work. All the people who waited out the holidays, postponing their elective investigations, will now land up.

Until later.....

The big old map was spring-mounted and once it was pulled down from the top edge of the blackboard, Sister Stringa would often wham at it with her long wooden pointer. The thick ragged oilcloth absorbed countless blows and it always made a satisfying ker-twang sound as it flew back up into the dusty darkness of the blackboard.

That's about all I remember about the countries of the world. Some of them were pink and some were pale yellow. There was plenty of baby blue water. And that's all I've ever needed to know, really -- until now. That attention I never paid? It's suddenly come due, with interest.

I've never been to Europe, or Asia, or even Mexico, unless you count Acapulco. I don't have a passport or a driver's license. It's not by any premeditated choice that I am so insular, and I would certainly jump at the chance to go pretty much anywhere in the world for a nice long visit. Circumstances, opportunities, life, money -- for whatever reasons, I've lived in the United States my whole life and I've seen very little of other countries, other societies, other brands of breakfast cereal.

My particular spot on the oilcloth map is Venice, California. It's ironic that I find myself living in a small insignificant city that is named after another grander and much more important city. My little Venice is built on a wide beach along the Pacific Ocean in a small stretch of sandy desert. The creator of this town had the hair-brained scheme to engineer actual canals (with actual Italian gondolas floating on them) and then suck in the sea water and create a magical resort community for the amusement of those wealthy, bored Hollywood folk who would come by train and tram to this edge of the world to spend their money. It actually worked -- for a few brief years at the end of the last century.

And now we are at the end of this century, at least for those countries who keep time to a Christian calendar. And I find myself involved in another grander and much more profound experiment than any one that has ever come before. I am a member of a new, world-wide community that is entered and enjoyed via my little antique Macintosh.

Welcome to the World Wide Web. It's true that this magical pixel playground is only available to those of us who are wealthy enough to afford a phone, an ISP connection, and a computer -- but I hope that we who are the creators and the stewards of this magical amusement will not let it disintegrate into a tacky shopping mall with a dark porn shop at one end and a vast gambling casino and noisy auction house at the other.

We deserve better.

Welcome to World Year. You are really going to like it here. You will find it amusing, challenging, rewarding ... and Lord help us, but you will actually end up learning something each time you visit us. I guarantee it. I would even bet real rubles and actual yen on it, were I the gambling type. I know it's already worked its magic on me. Let me prove it to you.

World Year is the brainchild of Tony Steidler-Dennison, a man from Iowa. Iowa is another place I've never visited, and perhaps you have never been there either. But once you start to read what Tony has to say, the place will light up on your mental map, never to be dimmed again. He's visited the movie site where they filmed Field of Dreams. Consider this World Year site an electronic field of dreams and watch it grow: Tony has built it, and they will come.

My very first bit of personal email in response to my own little dreamy website came from another World Year contributor, Fiona. When I clicked over to her site she was debating where she might vacation for the summer and what do you know! I thought she was from my old neck of the woods. She was talking about Jersey vs. Florida and I was shocked and chagrined to realize after a few more visits that this person who seemed just like me (only younger) was talking about the original Jersey, not my old home state of "new" Jersey. And worse -- that she was from a country on the other side of the Atlantic, in a city that formerly had been nothing more than the occasional nasty headline in my morning New York Times. Now, of course, thanks to Fiona, Belfast is no longer such a strange concept, but rather another well-lit place on my mental map. A real place full of real people like Fiona. Well, no one is exactly like Fiona ... as you will see.

And look at the other contributors here: in addition to my fellow Americans, there's a witty, quirky fellow from Moscow, a precocious youngster from Singapore, a beautiful artist from South Africa, a talented, athletic father from New Zealand, and a warm engaging mom from Germany. Any remaining ice from the cold war will not stand a chance when you start to read what these people have to say. That's the point of this experiment, I think.

And since I believe that there is no such thing as coincidence -- I'm a baby boomer living in Southern California, so there's got to be a little New Age babble mixed in with my old age babbling -- I am thrilled that I am paired up with a person from the continent I know the very least about: that big dark yellow blob on the old map known as India.

My partner is the famous and wonderful Man from Matunga and he was kind enough to point out in his entry that the name of his hometown has been changed from Bombay to Mumbai. Suffice it to say that I've managed to find a nice thick Rand McNally world atlas and a magnifying glass, and that one tip alone has saved me countless hours of searching among the painted mountain peaks and long-drawn-out river valleys for the location of his city.

Mumbai is perched on the ocean, just like Venice. Email flies into my computer from my friend Anna in Sydney faster than the time it takes to yell out the window to my neighbor next door. It's really magical. It's a smaller world than even Mr. Disney could imagine, but without the irritating singing animatronics.

Come and join us on this one-in-a-lifetime ride. You will not be the same when it's over.