How is 2007 coming along?

With 2006 officially left behind, we start hearing the question, so how is 2007 coming along? Or it is sometimes, how do you like 2007 so far? I find it funny to answer. Every day is a new year by itself. So I do not understand this silly question of how do you find 2007.

For official reasons, financial reasons, for academic reasons, for agricultural reasons and for so many such reasons, I see the need for marking a day as a beginning of the year. It may be like any important day of the year, which serves as a marking for any reason. It could be the equivalent of the equinox for example. But why do we attach so much of importance to this marker than the rest.

On the lighter side of it, I do enjoy the holidays that comes along with it. The feel of the holiday season is always a welcome. Right from my school days, I have been trained to have holidays during this season and during my school days it used to be Christmas holidays or as we used to call it, half-yearly holidays. There was a quarterly holidays too. Alias Pooja holidays for a week to 10 days. The half-yearly holidays were longer. They used to go for more than 10 days and not more than 15.

Those days were fun. Playing around, reading Amar Chitra Katha, Tinkle, Chandamama and the like. With granny preparing many different things to eat. Also, with the many holidays coming in, mom and dad used to be at home. They were mostly fun but for the times when me and brother used to have a fight and sulk around for sometime. But thinking back even that was fun. More than the New Year concept, it used to the fun of the whole family together that made them special. Guess that’s what makes such holidays fun and makes us get nostalgic at times like this.

As we grow up we start asking a lot of questions and the novelty of many things in life is lost. Once the television came in, it started having programs for the New Year’s Eve. It used to be an attraction for a couple of years. That’s the first time, I heard that term, and I remember asking my teacher what it means. But I still haven’t grasped the feel of what is so important about it to go about making such a big racket on account of it. There can be so many eve(s) that we can follow as a tradition where we can have the same racket.

One thing that I have understood over the years, people need some reason to freak out and enjoy. They just cannot enjoy for the very sake of enjoying. And I haven’t still understood why. One thing I have come to dislike over the years are those programs that these different channels churn out to hold their audience during such festive times. Eeeks… they just gobble up the time without you being aware that they have taken your time off.

As a resolution, I have decided not to watch too much TV this year. As it is I watch less and I am going to refrain from watching even that little and use that time to do more reading. Let me see how it goes. That way if someone asks me around March as to how is 2007 coming along, I would have something different to answer too. I might even look forward to someone asking me such a question.