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It figures that as soon as I was ready to tremble in fear at the prospect of India rising to dominate the globalized world of intellectual capital, something totally backward was bound to happen.

Last night I was ready to party. New Year's Eve is a time to party! So with the wonderful help of the lovely Swati Ayer who recently accepted a nice position at Cartoon Network India, congratulations, my friend Akshay and I found ourselves welcoming the new year in the company of many beautiful Indian women (and their yuppie husbands, but that's another story). No countdowns, no balloons - just fast active dance music until midnight, and then the power was cut for a long minute, and everybody knew it was 2005. Except for me, because I just assumed it was another power outage. In hindsight, this method of New Year announcement was simplistically beautiful, because you're left with a pitch-black and otherwise-silent room of screaming humans.

Our after-partying was cut a short around 1:00am - and here is the backwards part - by demonstrators for a big political party in India. These bhen chuths shut down all of the popular discos around Pune under threat of violence, and they were protesting and yelling outside of our very club! This group is famous for their anti-Western celebrations on nights like this. In February, I'm told, their henchmen smash storefront windows of businesses with Valentines Day heart and rose decorations. So the police had to come up to our little peacful club and nicely say that unless the music was turned off, the large crowd downstairs was going to get violent. Oh, and please do not take any alcohol bottles outdoors, or else you will get lynched.

I think that everybody celebrating Western-style took it in good stride, and there probably wasn't any real danger - just some unhappy people showing off their political muscle. The club had a great buffet upstairs, so most people simply stopped dancing and started eating.