Hello fellow-earthlings, we did it! We went around the sun one more time. What I don’t understand is, why are we celebrating it as if it is some sort of an achievement by us humans. Clearly, we didn’t have a choice no? Gravity held us here and so we stayed. Otherwise, Chennai folks would have drifted off to another planet and put their kids into a ‘strict’ engineering college in Jupiter or some such. That would’ve been a real achievement.
But I digress. I wanted to talk about celebrating New Year’s. Or more specifically, about New Year’s Eve parties. Now, if you were raised in Chennai, there is only one way of celebrating New Year’s. You don’t. Boss, who in their right mind spends money to usher in the New Year yaar! I understand that we have all been told people are supposed to do ‘cool’ things. Like sliding chest-down along a table like Kamal Haasan, screaming ‘Hi everybodyyy’ in S.P. Balasubrahmanyam’s voice, but you only ended up crashing on your younger sibling sitting on the other side of the table, thereby earning a thunderous thud on your back by one of your parents. Not the ideal way to welcome a New Year.
Or trying to be like the ‘cool’ kids in the movie Anjali , who wear sneakers inside the house, sneak out of their apartments in the middle of the night and go around the city singing songs with strangers. Boss, which Chennai kid could go out and do such a thing I just cannot imagine! I tried doing that once (it was not even New Year’s Eve and it was not even midnight) and yet I was caught in the act before even moving out of the bed, for I was sleeping next to my grandmother, who slept with her eyes open. In the days before technology, my grandmother was a CCTV camera, GPS monitoring system and voice-based alarm mechanism all rolled into one.
So on December 31, at best, our apartment residents association would put up a ‘variety show’ and distribute potato chips and Rasna. So much for ‘partying’. A few years later, while in college, there were rumours about how my friend’s friend’s cousin’s neighbours were part of this ‘awesome’ New Year party, and how they all counted down and rang in the New Year in great style. Interestingly, no one you knew directly ever went to these parties. There was also this ‘cool gang’ that boasted of having gone to Goa to party all the way through New Year’s Eve. There were also terms such as ‘farm house parties’, ‘beach house parties’ thrown at us poor kids, who didn’t even understand what they meant. It was all a grand mystery, and yet I badly wanted to be a part of it.
While all my parents wanted was a simple university rank and a gold medal out of me, all I wanted was to get invited to at least one New Year party. It was around this age when the newspapers were also full of advertisements with captions such as ‘New Year Bash’ or ‘New Year Gala’. Entry for such parties was priced slightly less than the going rate for a kidney or a liver, which unfortunately were already pledged for my engineering education. It became my life’s goal to attend at least one New Year party.
Now, many years later, even though I earn enough to afford an occasional litre of petrol, the mysterious New Year party continues to elude me. A few days back, I came across another ad that said ‘New Year’s eve midnight dinner buffet’ and my first thought was, ‘Who in their right mind eats dinner buffet at midnight?’ A few seconds later, my second thought was ‘OK, I have to go to this buffet now’. I decided to splurge and called up the fine-dining restaurant to reserve a table for two. The manager promised me a table at 10 p.m. sharp on December 31, 2018. I laughingly appreciated his sense of humour, to which he replied, with the seriousness of a cardiac-surgeon, that their restaurant was booked for the next two years.
What?! Who are these strange human beings who reserve dinner tables two years in advance? I politely cancelled my reservation and decided to try other places for mediocre mass-cooked food and diluted drinks at hyper-inflated prices. I received a similar response everywhere. People had already signed up to spend unnecessary amounts of money, thereby denying me the chance to do the same.
So, I am waiting as the earth begins one more revolution around the sun. Hopefully, next year, I will be invited to a ‘New Year Gala Bash.’ And while we wait for another 365 days, here’s wishing everyone a great laughter-filled 2017.
The Local Tea Party is a popular blogger from Chennai, known for his quirky prose. He prefers to be known by his handle (@localteaparty ).
