If one is dabbling with might-have-beens, why be mean and stick to a single possibility? This is one indulgence that costs nothing, so let’s be lavish and consider a whole bunch of things that the good fairy might cause to happen in the New Year. Or crank the time machine to make them happen in times past.

What if the Indian army had marched into Tibet in 1962, for instance, instead of fleeing helter-skelter into Assam, or Saddam Hussein given the Americans a bloody nose in 2003? Would India have returned captured Chinese territory in the sacred name of Hindi-Chini Bhai-Bhai or victorious Iraq invaded and annexed a defeated US like another Kuwait?

As for 2009, what if the UN declares Pakistan’s ISI a terrorist organization? Or the two warring Bangladeshi women abandon the pretence of being Raziya Begums and return to household chores like the middle-class, middle-aged ginnis they really are? What if Nepal’s Maoist party proves it is royalist-ridden (as Prachanda complains) by restoring ex-King Gyanendra?

Nearer home, would the shock of Subhas Chakraborty shedding his hat silence raucous vehicle horns and drive 35,000 autos into the oblivion where humbler rickshaws are rusting? What if Dalits and OBCs denounce the crutch of reservation, and reinvented Mamataa Banerjee, basking in the glory of that additional ‘a’, demands a ban on bandhs? Might the Nano return then to the womb in which it was conceived? What if all public servants in Bengal report for duty on time, stay the full day’s course and discharge all their duties without grumbling or demanding bribes? What, for instance, if newspapers abandon trivia and return to serious news?

It would be a new world. But it’s all wishful thinking. As my mother used to say, “If stands stiff in the corner.”

Sunanda K. Datta-Ray