2009 - welcome!

My first post for 2009.
Almost 2 weeks late, but hey - better late than never, aint it!

i've been a wee bit busy travelling, bonding with folks, and fighting some demons on the way. Emotionally tired after it all, but charged to move ahead...so it was a welcome change to be at home this last weekend, and to do....absolutely nothing.

did read the papers page to page. :) And it is with an interesting article, from the opinion section of TOI, that i have decided to start off posting in 2009.

Mr. Jug'gler with the JUGULAR VEIN, you help me laugh away my Saturday hangovers...

Calendar daze
Jug Suraiya

A fringe benefit of the economic downturn is that people have stopped sending out calendars and diaries. Remember how it used to be? Come the start of the year and you’d get a bunch of calendars, with a couple of diaries thrown in for good measure. The calendars were from big business houses, hotel chains, your local halwai, and they all had pictures: of major construction projects, of exotic holiday resorts where beautiful young things reclined in hammocks sipping complicated-looking drinks through straws, of well-fleshed gods and goddesses who were a divine testimonial to the virtues of asli ghee. I found the calendars useful, for covering the patch on the wall where a bit of the plaster had come off, or where a swatted mosquito had left a splatty brownish-red stain. The diaries didn’t have pictures. But they had their uses too. I used them to jot down random telephone numbers (random because i never remembered to put a name with the number, with the result that we had a collection of numbers that would have done a phone directory proud except we hadn’t a clue as to whom any of those numbers belonged), make grocery lists, and do the weekly sabzi hisaab.

I found plenty of uses for all those calendars and diaries and was grateful to the kind souls who’d been considerate enough to send them to me. The problem was that they gave me a guilt trip. The calendars and diaries, that is, not the people who sent them. And the reason for this was that a question kept nagging me: that while those calendars and diaries were undoubtedly being put to use, were they being put to the use they were meant for? And the answer, i had to admit, was ‘No’.

Calendars, and, even more so perhaps, diaries, are markers, or milestones, if you like, which chart the course of that invisible, intangible and relentless stream called time, which bears us along, often without our realising it, from moment to moment, day to day, year to year, birth to the other thing. Calendars, and diaries, are reminders, wake-up calls, which make us ask ourselves: are we making the most of the gift of time, can we “fill the unforgiving minute/With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run?” And in my case, the answer was a resounding ‘Nope’.

For instance, did Jan 1 on my calendar feature the reminder ‘Power breakfast with PM and PC’? Did my diary contain the Jan 1 entry ‘Teleconference with Bill G and W Buffett. Gave Warren some market tips and brought Bill up to speed on 3G convergence’? Uh, uh. Jan 1 on my calendar would likely be marked ‘Don’t forget the Saridon for hangover’. And the diary would probably say ‘1 kg Surfmatic, Amul cheese slices for Brindle, 2 toilet rolls, and WHERE’S THE GODDAM SARIDON??’ Not Samuel Pepys. Or Anne Frank.

So, not getting any calendars or diaries this year lets me off the hook in that i won’t feel obliged to do anything noteworthy or memorable, or indeed anything at all, in 2009. Which, so far as i’m concerned, is just fine. But is it also fine for all of us collectively, for what we call Civilisation As We’ve Got Accustomed To?

If on Jan 1, 30,000 BC, some unknown bright spark hadn’t inked onto his calendar ‘Must discover fire’ and in his diary for the same date ‘Invented wheel — now waiting for someone to invent General Motors. Boy, what a killing i’ll make’, would humankind have progressed so as to face the greatest global economic crisis ever? No way. And how are we going to get out of this crisis unless people like the PM, and PC, and Bill, and Warren, and you, buzz around like performance-enhanced bees and get things done? But how are you going to get anything done unless you have a calendar and a diary to motivate you to do it? Tell you what. Since no one else is sending them around, i’ll send everyone calendars and diaries. I’ll mark that on my calendar to remind myself to do so. Heck. Don’t have one, do i?