New Year yes, but Happy????

Another year's here again and I hardly noticed how 2006 came and slipped by. As usual, I am stuck 2 years behind time, and I find it tough to believe that its not 2005 but 2007 that we are in - that's me as usual - jaded, confused and all muddled up.

Saji - a good friend - has resolved this year to eat his words if he cannot keep them. He has written down his resolutions on a piece of paper and has promised to chew it if he breaks any of them. Saji, if you are reading this - I already broke a resolution before writing it down, so I am glad that I did not chose to go your way!

My foremost resolution is not to miss the 7:20 train in the mornings - unfortunately, I missed the train on 2nd January. It would have happened earlier had 1st January not been a holiday. My next resolution is to give work a royal ignorance this year. Work must suffer and cry out in neglect, but I refuse to heed. I had a particularly harrowed time in the last three hundred and sixty five days and it has left me with coal black circles under my eyes and a bloodshot look above. I have been jaded and confused most of the time, have fallen asleep in all ( mind you all!) dinner parties that I have attended, forgotten friend's birthdays and feel like giving up this job by the age of 27.

New Year started with a rather ugly feeling. Some people empowered by USA hanged Saddam Hussein. The whole affair was distasteful. If the people of Iraq were the ones to sentence him to death, I would not have felt so strongly - but this was clearly a case of US orchestration. If the USA can get the President of a country hanged by his own people, then they can get any of us - ordinary citizens - killed any day without a reasonable cause. To begin with, the entire war centered on WMD’s which were never found, but it ended with the hanging of the head of the country. Can any of us be sure of our freedom and right to life after this? I also do not support the idea of capital punishment. Life imprisonment seems little more merciful. Who are we to take away the life that we have not created. When a common man kills, it is murder, but when the law decrees that a man be hanged, it is hailed by all. Isn't the end result one and the same thing?

Umm....terrible things have been happening in Noida too, with all the killings of children. Suddenly, the world does not seem as rosy as it used to be, when I did not know or understand these brutalities. Looking at everything through rose coloured spectacles, is merely a means of escaping from reality, but sometimes its best to ignore those things that we can do nothing about. On the better side, Mamta Banerjee will eat in 2007. The President of India, a former Prime Minister and low blood pressure made sure of that. True, it did not make much difference to the farmers in Singur, but she will live to cause more traffic jams, and train disturbances and make my 7:20 come a few minutes late. Touché!

PS - Tatas sure want to make a car that costs 1 lakh. Do they also want to create more roads for us? When a car starts costing 1 lakh, even an impoverished Indian as me will be able to buy a car with a few years’ savings. What will happen to our streets, when millions take to Geeta Pishi (our cook) who instead walking to our house in the morning suddenly drives her new Tata IndiSmall?