To Boldly Write What No One Has Written Before

(Published in Zeitgeist, The New Indian Express, dated 27th December 2008)

The only question that's more annoying than "What plans for Valentine's Day?" is, according to the results of a survey of men who have never worn shiny T-shirts or 'Kool' chains, women who have never cried at Shahrukh Khan movies and assorted organisms that recognised 'Rang de Basanti' as the unfortunate lovechild of 'Contra' and Boyzone, is "What plans for New Year?"

Aside from the fact that recession and terrorists have hit hard enough to mute down celebrations, there's also the question "what exactly turns new?" One of my brothers, who was born on January 1st, 1988, thanks to a collusion between nature's forces and his attention-seeking genes, obligingly turns a year older on the day, sort of putting a dampener on my current quest. Of course, it was a while before he realised he would spend most of his life running to the phone on his birthday to be told "Hi!!!!!!!!!!!! Happy New Year! Now…is your dad around?" It was longer before he realised that, until his voice broke (and for a few years after), the voices in the phone would say, "Hi, Nandini!!!!!!!!!! Happy New Year! Now…is your dad around?", ensuring he had a wicked childhood and miserable youth which would leave him scarred for life.

That little diversion done with, let's think about it – there's an Academic Year, which goes from June to April, or September to July, or February to October, or August to May, depending on where you live. So the few months no one in the world moves up a class, watches one's classmates move up a class, changes schools, gets done with a grade, heads off on holiday or turns a graduate are January, March, November and December. Then, there's the Financial Year, which ends in March, and thanks to its having begun in April the previous year, no one has holidays left for the winter months. One would surmise the Germans (something about 'March' makes you think it was them, though 'April' could be dressed in a shiny pink leotard and tap dance to Right Said Fred in Paris) did that to spite the Romans, really, though they needn't have bothered. The Romans apparently messed up the solar year with their kings' fancies so much, that by the end of 47 BC, the Roman calendar was about three months ahead of where it should have been.

That means, essentially, January is the last of three months during which you have just about nothing to celebrate academically or financially, and are sweating out the wait for your appraisal (which, in 2009, may not happen). November and December don't particularly count, given the Deepavalis and Eids and Christmases and Hanukkahs that keep you busy eating and going at crackers (in whichever sense you choose to interpret the word), to culminate in the Marghazhi Music Festival in Chennai.

Perhaps the month does deserve due distinction, because, if nothing else, January has chronicled the failures of the human race remarkably well. (Note: this is not a snide reference to my parents or brother). The late nineties were a period of frantic waiting-with-bated-breath for the culmination of Nostradamus' prediction. Five hundred years of anticipation and we were the generation privileged to see it. The scientifically-inclined of the superstitious saw it coming with the Y2K bug – flights crash landing across the world, businesses going bankrupt, the Swiss losing track of how much no-questions-asked money they held, students killing themselves after messed-up SAT scores, God's timekeepers getting all muddled up and programming Kalki's horse to get carnivorous…there were plenty of delectable possibilities. Unfortunately, the day passed in disappointment for the depressed, and failure for Nostradamus. January is also traditionally that time of year people get back from honeymoons that followed winter weddings, and figure out what they married. This January, we will all realise how much we truly miss Bushspeak (and some standup comedians will go out of business). Surveys have shown most people failed to keep up their New Year resolutions to quit smoking, several times in their lifetimes. But if you really think about it, the biggest failure of all – and a universal one – in January is…one's inability, despite years of practice, to break out of putting down the previous year when one attempts to write the date for the first time that year.