Nerve Endings Firing Away

After receiving tons of New Years’ greetings and sending out none, I usher in the new year by reflecting on our typical celebrations back home in India.New Years’ Eve was often celebrated with an intention of doing something different but we always ended up doing the same thing year after year. The terrace back home was the unofficial venue for my friend circle. No matter how many different sets of friends I accumulated, the New Years’ Eve was traditionally celebrated with the same set of friends. We had our fun and screw ups ranging from churning the ice-cream pot until our forearms were sore to attempting a barbeque and ending up chewing half-roasted meat, almost rendering an eerie sense of a slasher movie. The party entertainment moved from lugging the 2-in-1 junk box stereo to computer jukebox MP3s but the dance steps to new songs remained the same. We went through the phases of the Chicken Dance, Summer of 69′s headbanging, Walk like a Egyptian, the Macarena, and the Ketchup song before settling down in the familar territory of Govinda moves, accentuated with the Bambiya Ganpati Visarjan chaotic movements.

With my two left feet, I never relished the thought of a prolonged dance party. If everyone needed a much-needed laugh, I was asked to dance which I promptly did enough to send everyone into raptures of mirth. Alcohol never featured in our parties of pious souls and champagne was the ultimate foray into the sinful world of alcohol. We stopped that as soon as our poster-boy of shyness burst into a jungle dance after merely sniffing the bottle, but not after making him dance for a good one hour.

The dumb charades always started off innocently with popular movies and slowly gliding into invented pron movies; regional ones at that. The holier-than-thou girls, aghast chastised us but nevertheless enjoyed it. This was the only day where we played childhood games of blind mans’ buff, vish-amrut, pakda-pakdi (tag), langdi, and god knows what other childhood games we subjected ourselves too.

We knew that we were getting really grumpy when last year, we finally broke our tradition of trying to stay awake the entire night playing stupid games and singing the oft-repeated songs. We never ventured into making resolutions because we knew that they would be forgotten the next day.

But times have changed and the group has dispersed. Couple of them are sailing on the high seas, some have drifted to the yonder known as the Americas and others in India are too tired to muster up enthusiasm to organize a party. But then again the parties have changed, at least as long as I don’t end up watching the top-ten of anything on the television, I considered having celebrated the New Years’ Eve decently.