Traditionally New Year is celebrated on the 1st of January every year. I often wonder why this day was chosen? I also wonder why everyone celebrates New Year on different day. The Chinese have just finished celebrating their New Year end January, the Punjabis will celebrate theirs mid-April, the Gujeratis in November and I along with several others whose ancestors united under the banner of King Shalivahan will celebrate tomorrow as New Year’s Day.

But on this New Year’s Eve, I am feeling strangely depressed. Possibly it has nothing to do with another year passing by but everything  to do with the boarding up of our building, the innumerable workers crawling out on the scaffolding, banging away from 9 in the morning and the three workers inside my house doing the re-wiring. Now this particular activity is a misery is of my own making because we were the only people in our 75 flat building with the original 40 year old aluminium wiring. For years we’ve been meaning to change it to the safer copper wiring which is the norm these days but always put it off because of the inconvenience it would cause. However, watching a building blaze up right before our eyes mid December last year. literally scared us to death and we decided that at the earliest convenient opportunity, we’d re-wire the flat.  So it is two weeks now when we’ve had our house covered in layers of dust by sundown , cleaned up at night time only to have another dust shower the next day………………

Getting a house refurbished while you are living in it is tedious for both the residents and the workers. Keeping things away makes finding them more difficult. Moving out is equally difficult because you have to keep coming back to see how the job is getting done.And as for the workers it’s quite a pain dealing with incessant questions and repeated requests to hurry up………….Aaaaaaagh.

It’s just not a happy new year for me tomorrow.

p.s. However, to all my co-tribesmen : A Happy New Year to you all!

I’ve taken the image of Mont Blanc blazing from the net…It is a TOI image