What is it about 'new years' that make otherwise perfectly reasonable chaps conduct themselves like a bunch of bozos? A flurry of resolutions are hastily made that will be broken in equal speedy fervour. Undoubtedly, the most popular query doing the rounds is "Hey, what plans for new year's?" (How I hate the word 'plans'!!) And if you don't have any grand 'plans', God help you! You're looked upon as a speck of dust, something a fastidious luncher is prone to do, on spotting a caterpillar doing the merry-go-rounds on his freshly-ordered salad.
You live with that. The run-up to midnight is annoying, for lack of a more apt word. Needless to say, it never does to turn on the TV unless you've got a I-want-to-turn-lunatic-this-year wish for yourself. To subject your senses to the madness floating around, you'd have to be loony yourself to be in sync with all that fancy brouhaha. Little known telly 'stars' jiggle in garish costumes, hosts yell out the customary 'happy new years' in screechy tones and your eyes are subjected to a gaudy bonanza of confetti and cheap crackers that are in fact released weeks before the new year. Somehow, your remaining senses limp to the midnight hour and the wall-clock then chimes in cheerful innuendos, announcing midnight with the same droll disposition that it did with last year around. Firecrackers light up the dark skies all around the world, no doubt making for quite a spectacle, but a menace nonetheless to even the dullest of ears. Funny part is they last 1 hour past the celebrated midnight. Surely not running late, are we? Revellers rule the decked-up streets, getting boozed up to the backs of their teeth, making pests of themselves to the general public. And the ones who make a killing out of all this ballyhoo are pubs, discotheques, restaurants, malls and the like who leave no stone unturned in fleecing the last dime in said reveller's pocket. What a waste all this!
Don't tick me off as a killjoy who derives passing pleasure in preventing people from enjoying themselves. Or someone who is perhaps too ugly to get a date on new year's eve. I find all this its-new-year-lets-go-bump-a-daisy stuff a bit too much of a facade. Its the same shit happening all over again the moment the clock stops chiming, the firecrackers finally cease crackling and the revellers all go back home, the booze receding to the darker recesses of their intestines. What has one gained from the above transactions, other than contracting a golly heavy headache the morning after? If we must celebrate, let us celebrate when villages reeling under utter darkness are equipped with electricity, when starving kids get 3 decent square meals a day, when AIDS has been wiped off the face of the earth, when poverty is just something witnessed in the past, where education is free for all and when we live a peaceful and harmonious life, free from bondages of terror and hate.
Then I shall celebrate. Cause that will be an event worth celebrating for.
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