On New Year's Day

 It is a known truth that if one claims to be a hobby blogger, then one must show for it at least one article a year. Consequentially, there is this immense urge to get the first write-up of the year off the mark. This urge begins when, on the midnight of any December 31st, the clock ticks, and lo, we are in a new year. Hence, this much celebrated transition happens to be the subject of this article.

We humans have divided our day to day life in many temporal divisions. An ordinary human deals with units as small as seconds, when a frozen dish needs to be nuked in the microwaved, to half decades and decades, when we do long term planning. We have minutes, hours, days, weeks, months. However, passing of any of these hardly merits a celebration like we do when a year passes. Some puppy love couples (and parents of infants - I included), do celebrate passing of months (menniversary?) However, we put special emphasis in the celebration of our circumambulation of the sun - not only the calendar year, but also the things like birthdays and wedding anniversaries. What lead to this primacy of the year, over all the other time periods? Come to think of it, most of our time partitions are artificially constructed. The only two naturally occurring time divisions are diurnal, and annual. We can observe the sunrise, the growing of the sunlight, the bright noon, the evening, with sunset and dusk, followed by the night. However, the day repeats too frequently to be amenable to celebrations - though some of us do solemn prayers early morning! Similarly, the annual cycle is a natural cycle - the warm glow of spring, which grows into the blazing summer, which grows humid and culminates into the rainy season, followed by warm sunny days that lead to the winter chill, when, as the saying goes, the spring is not far behind! In the old days, the waxing and waning of the moonlight would have affected humans significantly, and hence there would have been significance of the monthly cycles, but the modern Gregorian months are no longer exactly aligned with the lunar cycles anyway. Hence, the year occupies a special signifance in our hearts.

In our country, though, there always remains a question of "which year". In our working and social life, we are dictated by the Gregorian calendar. Hardliners would call it the "Christian Calendar", and they would not be wrong, as the calendar was started by a Pope. There is a "Hindu Calendar". In fact there are two - the Saka Samwat, the official calendar of India, and the Vikrami Samwat. The year in both coincides, but the count of year is different. The Samwat calendars do impact our lives significantly - our major festivals are "fixed" in them - Holi falls in the Poornima of Falgun month, as does Deepawali on the Amavasya of Kartik. Infact the Samwat calendars are much complicated and scientifically advanced. The months are lunar, and follow the moon cycle accurately - with Amavasya and Poornima falling on no-moon and full-moon days. The year is roughly solar, and stays true to the solar cycle over a long period of time (unlike the Hijri calendar, which follows the moon faithfully, and hence falls short of the solar cycle by 10 days every year, which leaves us with the interesting phenomenon of Eid and other festivals falling in different seasons over a long period of time, unlike Hindu festivals, which largely stay in a defined time band.) This is because the Samwat calendar puts in an extra month or Adhimas every few years. The Adhimas is added to the month it follows, and successive Adhimas get added to the following month, so that over a long period, all 12 months get an Adhimas. The consequence, of course, is that the "New Year Day" does not coincide with the same spot in the cycle every year.

Thus, for all its historicity and practicality, the celebration of the Gregorian Calendar New Year has become a worldwide event. Though it is a part of the Christmastide (which is itself wholly inspired from the Germanic Yuletide), the New Year's Eve and the New Year's Day is wholly a secular holiday. Hence, it was a little jarring to go through my Whatsapp feed this time. The number of messages wishing me a Happy "Western" New Year, or "Working" New Year, or "Anglican" New Year, or "Foreign" New Year, to top it all, had multiplied manifold. Some messages were downright apologetic and condescending- implying that this is not truly the New Year, but since you believe in it, hence I deign to wish you a Happy New Year grudgingly! There were a few messages contrasting the drunken revelry some of us do in the New Year's Eve party, to the pious fasting done during Chaitra Navratri! These qualified wishes do take away the whole point of wishing someone. The social media is replete with the whole spectrum of indic cultural revival, and yes, there is a need to restore pride in the cultural treasure of this rich civilization. However, pride is endogenic. If our expression of pride is coming through sanctimonious pulling down of "the other", it is not pride, but plain old envy in a self-righteous disguise. With the powers that be turning into a permanent Grinch for the foreseeable future, this is the last thing we need with us.

Another jarring observation was the fact that how many of us were demonizing the year gone by. Lots of memes, with the zero of 20 replaced by a blow up of the coronavirus, and the one of 21 replaced by a vaccine syringe, were shared. Somehow that defies logic, as if the pandemic is somehow contained in the year. Well, for starters, the disease of commonly known as Covid-19 - that 19 stands for 2019. So blaming 2020 somehow is like putting the blame of the arsonist on the guy whose house he burnt down! However, all said and done, we cannot deny that we have lived through a remarkable year. It was marked as remarkable way back at the turn of the Century. We were in our earlier teenage, in the school. The nation had just flexed its nuclear muscles, and we were told that we would be a superpower in 2020. It was safely far out in the future for conjecture and hyperbole, and yet near enough to tantalize. The mere sound of it - Twenty Twenty, was magical. Well, we all know how it turned out finally. We did have the pandemic, which was truly once in a century event. However, more remarkable was the Lockdown that was created by it. That was unprecedented. As administrators, it gave our generation something to reminisce about later - for some get the opportunity to hold elections in 5 years, some get to do the Census in 10 years, but only a select few got to do the management of a nationwide curfew for such a long period. As an icing on the cake, we also had a plague of locusts this year, something straight out of the biblical accounts!

Anyway, what transpired earlier cannot mar the enjoyment of the moments when one year melds into another. Others prefer loud boisterous and boozy parties. I, in true Yuletide spirit, prefer it quiet. My current dwelling has a hearth (which had been boarded up by the previous occupants, and had been got restored by us), and a nice blaze really sets the mood. Some dry cake, some reading material - like the history of the District, and to complete it all, some good music. Unlike the Christmas playlist, New Year's Day has fewer songs to its credits. There is always the classic Auld Lang Syne. Or, for us who were adolescents at the turn of the Millennium, there is Waiting for Tonight by Jennifer Lopez. However, for some reason, this time I found myself playing the immortal Aane Wala Pal, Jaane Wala Hai - on a loop. There could be no better song to celebrate the passing of time, capturing at the once the ephemerality of it all, as well as the opportunity of living out an eternity in that ephemeral moment! On that thought, I end this article, and wish the reader a very Happy New Year!