At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps — my apologies to Jawaharlal Nehru for what follows — I will, instead of awakening to life and freedom as India’s first prime minister had said, pull out a frayed, yellowish paper, my New Year resolutions from last year, to see how many of those I failed to honour.
This is because New Year’s Eve — it will fall three days from now — comes, inevitably, with a sombre reminder of a tidy hill of promises that we inevitably fail to keep. For instance, on the stroke of midnight as 2024 was making way for 2025, amidst a frightening din of firecrackers and inebriated voices, I had promised, earnestly but, as it turns out, without conviction, to shed tiny slices of my expanding girth. In hindsight, I think I should not have sworn to shed some pounds; it should have been expressed in terms of the rupee. Given our national currency’s continuing free fall, I would have, by December 2025, felt lighter in body and spirit.
My New Year resolution was by no means a statistical anomaly. YouGuv polls have consistently found that in a round world with an alarming number of rotund people, losing weight remains one of the most common forms of New Year pledges even though — and here’s the rub — a staggering 91 per cent of New Year resolutions to thin down fail by February.
Given humanity’s infidelities with New Year resolutions, I looked around for refuge — and found it in G.K. Chesterton. Chesterton, the creator of the cheery, cherubic sleuth Father Brown, seems not to mind humanity’s abject failure to keep its word on New Year’s Eve. He, in fact, urged mankind to make more of that st(fl)uff. “The object of a New Year,” he argued, “is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes…”
All of this made for pleasant reading till I realised that Chesterton did not have a word to say on a new (shrinking) waistline. Suddenly, I felt deflated — alas, only metaphorically.
Desperate to make a New Year commitment that I can keep, I turned my attention to some of the ideas that wise men and women have spouted over centuries. Could there be a New Year pledge here that I would keep?
Kierkegaard had one solution to life’s woes: to walk. This may work in China and Hong Kong — apparently, these places are peopled by those who walk the most — but it is impractical in New India. Every breath you take while walking here could be your last, given our sulphurous air.
Aristotle insisted we should spend more time with friends. At last count, my friends circle had shrunk further — from five to two — this year. Aristotelian philosophy, evidently, is not for the socially awkward seeking a New Year promise to make.
Nietzsche, typical of him, gave me a panic attack. He asks one and all to “become the person who you are”. Perhaps I thought with a shudder that I have, indeed, become what I truly am: a middle-aged, cynical, fickle loner who cannot keep a New Year pledge.
The Buddha urged all to read more. The pile of unread books on my bookshelves gave me the side-eye in return. To finish the stacks of unread books, I whispered back to the Buddha, I would need many rebirths.
Simone de Beauvoir, who, like a general, barked at me to take charge of my life, grated on my nerves. If I could have taken charge of my existence, I wouldn’t have needed New Year resolutions as a fix, lady!
But then, at last, I found Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic, kind — kindred — soul. He simply asks us to embrace change. In Heraclitus’s humane gaze, even a dazed, disillusioned, fireless spirit with a thickening girth — the shape of middle age — is just fine, even if it means that life and fate can no longer fit their arms around our bulging forms in a gesture of sympathy.
This December 31, I will pledge — here we go again — that this will be the year of Heraclitus.