Millennium Celebration:

I with my friends got a chance to participate in London Millennium Celebrations. Although we are afraid of racial as well as other attacks initially, Scotland yard officer's interview, "We are giving asylum to almost anybody here, so the wrong people would not do anything that would spoil their existence" gave us courage to proceed to London.

On the New Year's eve at 2 p.m., we reached London from Bristol. Crowd started thronging Central London. In Piccadilly Circus there were colourful advertisement boards stood well illuminated. At around 5.30pm Nescafe advertisement changed into a New Year Countdown clock of millennium for Bangkok. People shouted with happiness, when it was millennium in Bangkok. Near Trafalgar Square, a big Christmas tree was kept. Also 2 more big TV Screens were giving information about New Year Celebration in different places. At around 6'o clock, BBC news gave information about Yeltsin resignation and also the end of hijacking drama. I with my friends rushed to Piccadilly Circus back to see India's New Year. Unfortunately the time has crossed 6.32pm and India's New Year was over.

At 8.30pm there was fire display for 30 seconds, we stood opposite to a big millennium Giant Wheel. Giant Wheel was supposed to carry people, unfortunately it failed the quality test, so now it stood idle. For four hours, same type of Laser shows bored the viewers. People start to entertain themselves. An old lady near me started singing loudly "Common Barbie Girl". Another lady opened a newspaper and started telling clues for the puzzle. Leg started paining after 2 hours. We started cursing the British Government for poor organising of the function. VIPs however had the chance of enjoying the programmes inside the newly constructed Millennium Dome costing around 450 million pounds. At 12.00 midnight, fire crackers show started and continued for 15 minutes. It was really world class. We thought our waiting was really justified.

On return to railway station (Name: Embankment) pushing through 2 million gathered crowd, we saw the station closed. We cursed the British Government again for not caring for normal people. We praised our Tamil Nadu Government's extra buses during exhibition time in Island Grounds, Madras. We walked to another railway station (Name: Charring Cross), after a wait of 30 minutes in queue the result was same. Finally we got our train at Victoria railway station. During our walk, we saw the road fully occupied by beer glass bottles (full and broken). Lot of people walked in nearly falling down condition due to heavy drinking. I was really shocked to see Indian & Pakistani youngsters including girls fully drunk and received kisses from many persons making use of this opportunity. I really got concerned about lot of new entrants in US from India, who should really see their sons & daughters won't behave like this after 15 or 20 years from now. A middle aged Indian (may be Pakistani) is one of them enjoying this happy moment. Also I saw one person bleeding in the face all over and murmuring in a feeble drunken voice for help. We diverted a police towards him. As the crowd was in millions, people don’t want to wait in queue for available toilets and part of British Parliament (ofcourse outside) become an open toilet ground.

People who have visited Atlanta Olympics will remember the crowd behaving like Kandivilli crowd in shouting and pushing people due to overcrowdedness.

This incidents should show appreciation and respect to our Indians in India who want to be polite and show decency inspite of our huge population problems.