The same old New Year
THE Great Timekeeper is licking His finger, ready to turn the page again. Tomorrow, at the strike of midnight, the book of eternity will open to page 2012. There will be merriment all over the world as men and women are going to drink and dance through the night. Many of them will wake up with hangover and fatigue next day, too late for the new sun that will either have reached the mid-sky or dipped in the west by then.
Even though time is a divine thing, the New Year is manmade. Mankind has used the sun, moon, planets and stars to measure the passage of time throughout its existence. Ice-age hunters in Europe over 20,000 years ago scratched lines and gouged holes in sticks and bones, possibly counting the days between phases of the moon. Five thousand years ago, Sumerians in the Tigris-Euphrates valley in today's Iraq had a calendar that divided the year into 30-day months, divided the day into 12 periods, each corresponding to 2 of our hours, and further divided these periods into 30 parts, each corresponding to 4 of our minutes.
Time in itself is a continuous flow but a year is an arbitrary line we draw every 365 days. The New Year's Day drops frames in the footage of eternity so we can indulge in the illusion of tracking its length. It's like the stereotype of a prisoner who scratches tally marks on cell walls to count time. Even better, it's like the milestones at regular intervals that measure the distance on a road. If one would like to look for a beginning on the New Year's Day, I suppose, another could look for an end as well.
Around the year 1330, a poet and Buddhist monk named Kenko wrote: "The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty." Come to think of it, how much of that uncertainty changes from year to year if not more of the same? Who can deny the monotony of living from three meals a day to three meals a day or from the lack of it to the lack of it? Who can deny the same bodily functions that are repeated over and over again? Who can ever deny the ennui of existence that comes in the daily dollops of mechanical motions we perform between coming out of bed in the morning and going back to it at night?
People who commit suicide are those who succumb to this gloom of dailiness. For them next day is just the same as the previous day; yesterday, today and tomorrow being an endless repetition of the same organised emptiness. The coming year looks just as vacant as the old year that passed away.
True, only a few people kill themselves while most people like to live. One can think of life as a huge multiplex theater where different screens show different films. Since all the films aren't equally absorbing, some viewers quit in the middle of the movie while others stay through the end credits. And there are movie buffs so engrossed that they don't mind sitting through repeated screenings.
It was American industry author Bill Vaughn who described the New Year's Day as a time when an optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in and a pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves. How many of us are looking forward to welcome 2012 and how many of us are waiting to see 2011 leave? What are we going to celebrate at the strike of midnight? Where is our mind going to be at that particular moment? Is it going to be in the departure lounge of a bygone year? Or, is it going to be in the arrival lounge of a whole new year?
The story goes that the late Russian ruler Joseph Stalin liked to proudly display his piles of fresh, clean underwear, which he boasted he changed everyday. Ordinary folks, who can hardly scrape three meals a day, cannot afford even that little change. Others will change from something to everything including car, home, business, country of domicile, and even spouse. On that range of affordability, the New Year's Day brings a fresh round of the foregone conclusion that life is as good as we live it.
The irony is that we look forward to a new beginning because we also look forward to an end. If the going is good, who should ever want any change? For the drinking, reveling people, the New Year's Eve will be an extended weekend, another day to get high and hilarious and stay out late. For the rest of humanity it's just an illusion. They badly need a new year because the old year like the years before has exhausted them.
The writer is Editor, First News and an opinion writer for The Daily Star.
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