Jokes Apart | Memories of new years past and some notes on 2022, the year when nothing happened

In 1987, REM released a song that went, ‘It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.’ As another year draws to a close, that apocalyptic scenario is not something we have to worry about just yet. But yes, it’s the end of the year as we know it, and I’m sitting staring at a mug of Old Monk, hot water and freshly squeezed lemon, wondering if the glass is half full or half empty. I’m glad I’m not in Bihar, calling up unscrupulous bootleggers for hooch, keeping my fingers crossed that I wake up in the New Year with my vision intact. We Indians are impatient about endings. In the 1980s, it was standard practice to walk out of the cinema, just when the climax began. I once asked a person about this tradition of the pre-emptive exit. He told me that since everyone knows how a masala film ends, why waste time; the climax is nothing more than cinematic necessity/ formality. We are also impatient when flights land. We unfasten our seat belts, stand up and crowd the aisles, even though the doors will not open for the next 20 minutes. It’s not possible to rush the end of the year though; it will happen when it has to, at the stroke of midnight, the Cinderella hour. Unlike Cinderella, our lives will remain pretty much the same, even as everyone will breathlessly, mechanically, habitually, wish ‘Happy New Year’ to each other. In the UK and America, the period from 22 December or thereabouts till 5 January or so, is when time comes to a standstill. Halls of residence and offices empty out; everyone is on vacation. This is followed by the trend called ‘Dry January’, when folks give their livers a rest by abstaining for a month. Culturally, Diwali for us has more meaning than New Year celebrations. Even the beginning of the New Year according to the Indian calendar is not a national event or holiday. It’s perfectly okay to be alone on New Year’s Eve, but not on Diwali. Growing up in Allahabad, we’d sit around a bonfire in someone’s garden. My father would come pick me up at five past twelve sharp. The parties took place in discos in faraway lands, like Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata. If at home, we sat with our parents and watched the year-end special on Doordarshan. It invariably featured Usha Uthup belting out a rendition of the Bangles’ ‘Walk Like an Egyptian’, followed by George Michael’s ‘Faith’. The show was always produced by a DD wing called CPC, or Central Production Centre, which had a Soviet ring to it. Then we went to sleep. If I was in Mumbai, at my uncle’s place in Malad, he would put on Bappi Da’s ‘Disco Station’ on his mono two-in-one; we’d crank up the volume and dance with each other in the cramped 1BHK. In the slum across the compound boundary wall, a man would get drunk and beat his wife. We’d watch the commotion from our balcony, then go back to rewinding ‘Disco Station’. Still, New Year celebrations mean something to all of us; it’s the only ‘festival’ that the world has in common. We share the same work calendar. While birthdays are a time for personal stock taking, an individual event, New Year’s Eve is a time for collective reflection. All living beings – trees, fish, animals, birds, humans - like stability. Looking back, 2022 was a year when nothing remarkable happened. Which is good in a way. There was no trauma of the Delta wave, when the situation resembled the fog of war, or the ecstasy of winning the cricket World Cup. Nor were our lives disrupted by great inventions. If one thinks about the period from the 1990s into the Noughties and beyond, each year was marked by the advent of affordable new technology that changed the way we lived and worked: dial-up Internet and broadband; the desktop and the laptop; the proliferation of STD and PCO booths, the Nokia mobile phone, followed by the smartphone, which packed in more technology than the rocket that first took man to moon; Orkut, Facebook and Twitter; the death of the compact disc and the arrival of downloadable and streaming music; the demise of VHS and the coming of Netflix and OTT platforms; the manufacture of the first Corona vaccines. This year was marked by little tweaks to what already existed, an incremental evolution. Press a button and one’s TV will curve; press it again and it will straighten out. 4G became 5G. The IPL added two new teams. Space flight was democratised, in other words, billionaires could now fly to the edge of space and back, not something that affected the little man. Blockbuster cinema from the South crossed over to pan Indian and international audiences. Will Smith slapped a fellow Black man and immediately hopped on the next flight to spiritual India to meet his guru and calm down. When talking about the end of the year, how can one not talk about that very Western obsession: New Year resolutions. They remain the same with each passing year, because human beings remain the same. The bucket list goes something like this: exercise more, take up a sport or cause, achieve more, read more, watch less TV, drink less, quit smoking, keep regular bedtimes, spend more quality time with family et al. As the cliché goes: resolutions are meant to be broken. Also, these are selfish resolutions, only to do with self-betterment. At the risk of sounding like a social worker, I’d like to see more collective resolutions, the sort where we can all contribute and make a difference. The State and its organs can only do so much, it’s the people – us - who have to change. Take the latest viral clip. On 27 December, in Cleo County in Noida, a resident can be seen assaulting domestic help, dragging her from the lift, even as she clings to the door. One has seen this happen to lift operators and security guards. These incidents take place in gated enclaves inhabited by the wealthy and the educated. Let’s make a resolution to treat our own with humanity and basic decency. There is one indecent inhuman man for whom the year couldn’t have ended on a happier note. Charles Sobhraj walked free, flying out of Nepal to his native France. In 1986, when the infamous Tihar jailbreak happened, I was 11-year-old, and very frightened. I was convinced he would turn up in Allahabad and go on a killing spree, even though no one here wore bikinis and the town was never on the hippie trail, his usual hunting ground. Every time the doorbell rang I was convinced it could be him, asking for shelter. This New Year, I’m glad I’m not remotely anywhere near France. I’ll wrap up with an anecdote. One New Year’s Eve I found myself in Mumbai’s Film City. It was a chilly night. The place was shut, except for one set, where they were shooting a film. They’d play a saawan song, turn on the rain machine, while the starlet lip-synced and danced in the artificial monsoon. When the director said ‘cut’, the starlet’s mother would rush to with a towel and wrap her in it. The pathos of the scene cannot be overemphasized. I hope that girl made it as a heroine. The writer is the author of The Butterfly Generation: A Personal Journey into the Passions and Follies of India’s Technicolor Youth, and the editor of the anthology, House Spirit: Drinking in India. Read all the Latest News , Trending News , Cricket News , Bollywood News , India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook , Twitter and Instagram .