Wishing for the Old New Year's Day

How should the New Year's eve be planned? When I was younger and in Ranchi, it was easier. There were not enough things to do.  Ranchi would be freezing at two or three degrees. There were no pubs, lounges, discos, bars – call them what you will (though I am sure frequent visitors will know or find a distinction). So our family would have a bonfire and cook around it and we would bring the TV set outside. Sometimes friendly neighbours (who were a lot more intimate and interested than those in metros) would also be invited. And in between meaningless but always well-meaning conversation and good food the year gone by would give way to the new. There was no urgent and definitive need to do something out of the ordinary and yet New Year's came with the placid feeling you get when you turn over a new leaf in life. A New Year was actually a new beginning and held promise and anticipation. Every year.

Then something changed. New Year's Day got clubbed with Christmas. We had never grown up with the concept of a "weekday" and a "weekend". There was just one day towering above the rest, the Sunday. Anyway, the point I am making is New Year's Day began being viewed as the "weekend" after Christmas. The spirit of conviviality that marks Christmas, spilled over on to New Year's day. Indeed the whole week in between. Slowly, conviviality was replaced with revelry. Family with strangers. And with it came the itch. "What are you doing on New Year's?" "Which pub?" "Goa?" "De Rigueur!"

Today, one should brace themselves to be treated with scorn or pity if the answer to the dreaded question, "what are you doing on New Year's?" is, I watched TV or worse slept. If one has not made prior plans, he or she is duty bound to chalk out something hurriedly, just to escape being called a social wet blanket.

What am I doing on New Year’s Eve? Nothing as yet but the air is full of possibilities of half-hatched, dire and disastrous things I might do in the guise of having fun. Sleeping seems better. Two dominant categories of people emerge: first one who is brazenly lazy, soulless, witless; and the second who is uncontrollably excited at the prospect of having fun but at the end of the whole of it seems too depressed because of all the fun-having. I have an aversion for both, especially the second.

Yet in all of this my mind goes back to the time when New Year’s Day was about new things. It was a singular even on the calendar, the bridge between the old and the new. It facilitated a serene transition and gave hope. Hope, any day is better than a hangover. Cheers to that.