Goodbye to a bad year

Goodbye to a bad year

The end of any year is a funny thing. At one level it’s a nonsensical thing to be contemplating. The Roman calendar is just one notional grid imposed on our minds over the last couple of millennia. Even though its influence has spread, it’s still in competition with various other calendars. For instance, the Gujarati new year went by two months ago and the Bengali one will come only in what some people call April. Weather-wise, we tend to attach both winter and Christmas to the turn of the year, but that is a peculiar hemispherical bias with a glaze of Western Christianity. Down in the southern latitudes, Christmas means sweat and the New Year is brought in wearing minimal clothing at beach parties. In many places in the world, Christmas means little or nothing. What all calendars do is give us some simulacra (an image or representation of someone or something.) of a grip on slippery time and in that, breaking our existence down diurnally (on daily basis) and then into days of the week, weeks of the month and months of the year is useful.

New years over time

In the early years of life, every new year is an advance, a block removed on the path to adulthood, to doing this, that and the other for the first time. A bit later, the common wisdom is to slightly regret the passing of each year. The tendency is to tally (reckon) the lost opportunities, the tragedies and the loss caused by that particular set of 12 months. To counter this, we also tend to have a ledger of achievements, of lists ticked off, of the good things that happened.

For some reason, for me this year has felt different. In one way it has passed too quickly. In another way I can’t wait to put this sucker behind me, what with all the misery, sadness, and trauma it has brought. But in a third way, the passing of 2017 feels like an unfinished wrestling match, as if there has been a series of brief, intense frappes between the year and oneself, with the year leaving bruises and scars and slipping away without taking quite enough damage from the return blows. In some peculiar way right now, 2017 feels like an opponent who has stepped out of the ring between rounds, an adversary taking a breather before it comes back and starts punching again.

The list of bad things that happened this year, the horrible stuff that continued unabated (without any reduction in intensity or strength.) is too long and depressing. Whether on a global level or just in India, the negative chart, the half-emptiness of the glass, is huge. Ecologically, our slide into hell speeded up a bit. Any year that begins with the installing of an evil ‘thug’ like Donald Trump in one of the two or three most powerful political offices on the planet has to be marked among the historically really bad years.

When, in India, that is followed by someone like Bisht-Aditynath assuming control of the country’s largest State, the badness of the year starts to assume champion proportions.

Again, if you look beyond individual tragic events such as the murder of Gauri Lankesh or the lynchings of poor Muslims, you can see that several pockets of our society are divided and self-cannibalising in a way we haven’t seen in many decades. Economically too, no matter how many invisible cloaks of fudged figures the government puts on the naked economy, we are headed for the high jump into a very deep trough.

Whichever way you look at it, some very horrible days lie ahead of us; whatever spin you put on it, things will get worse, much worse, before they get better.

Keep on punching

And yet, if there is one thing the year has brought out, it’s the supreme value of old-fashioned stamina, of the importance of digging in, of keeping on punching without worrying about where and how hard each punch lands. At the end of this strangely closure-less year, as dark grey 2017 segues (move without interruption) into an even blacker 2018, it’s good to remind oneself that the small things matter, that each small positive action is a seed for future possibilities. Every plastic bag you refuse, every car ride you don’t take, every vote you put in against the huge political machinery that confronts us is worth something. It matters. On the flip side, let’s never forget that every act of callous (showing or having an insensitive and cruel disregard for others.) oligarchical greed and every bit of murderous oppression will have a cost for the perpetrators. One day soon, those costs will reach critical mass, leading to their downfall.

As a bruising 2017 squeezes into a potentially formidable 2018, it’s good to protect moderate hopes. Trump may not get impeached in 2018 but he and his ilk (a type of person or thing similar to one already referred to.) will take serious long-term damage. The cabal (a secret political clique or faction.) of Dark Arts practitioners that rules over us will increasingly find all sorts of youth movements rising up against them as the future fights back against the reactionary regime it has imposed. The cost of solar power will come down further, wind farms will increase in size, more and more people will realise that they need to bury the idea of the private automobile. All over the world, people will keep dancing to music, and 2018 will take us one step (or more) closer to defeating (trouncing) the enemies of love and equality.