Sunday Snippets
By Venkatesh Raghavan
The custom of making New Year resolutions is reportedly 4000 years old and in its renewed avatar owes its existence to the Roman Empire in the middle-ages. Originally, it was about making promises to their respective Gods to turn away from their sinful behavior and transform into a new leaf. However, with passage of time, it turned into a goal set for personal wellbeing, including health or cultivation of new hobbies.
My tryst with the New Year resolutions began way back in the second year of my junior college days in Mumbai. It started with I will quit smoking cigarettes. Till 12 p.m. on January 1, I did manage to keep the promise. Being unable to resist my urge, I convinced myself, I can still keep my promise by smoking beedis and avoiding cigarettes. For a few hours, I kept smoking beedis. Soon I gave in telling myself, it makes no difference what brand of tobacco I use.
As the years progressed, peer pressure started building up among our student community to make resolutions well in advance of December 31, with each one asking the other about how well we live up to our resolutions. This time around, I was in my second year of engineering. I told my colleague Nilesh Narkhede that I have made a resolution to read at least two chapters from the Holy Bible each day. Unlike the short-lived resolution in my year of junior college, this resolution lasted till January 15, after which I kept postponing on when exactly I will open and read from the pages of the Holy Bible.
It was much later in life, when I was researching theories like law of attraction and law of reverse effect that I stumbled across the benefits accruing from wasted efforts. It just meant that though the efforts I had made to quit smoking and regularly reading the scriptures seemed to have failed on the face of it, in the long run, each and every human endeavor does bring in benefits in its own way.
Needless to say, my attempts to continue reading the Holy Bible regularly, over a period of time, succeeded in my being able to read the entire scriptures from Genesis to St John’s Revelation several times over and over again. I then had an animated conversation with my friend Amir on how the theory of wasted efforts can keep you in good stead even if it means you have ended up breaking your New Year resolution.
With the passage of years, however, the focus on making resolutions started fading. Our age group was more enamored with making Valentine friends, earning a sufficient number of wrist bands on Friendship Day, honoring the Distaff side on Women’s day and so on. As trends and patterns of social interactions kept changing, the social media including WhatsApp and Facebook played facilitators to the Groups which tended to wish and greet each other at the drop of a hat, be it any festival or occasion.
Having gone through all such interactions over the years, the best idea that came to my mind is that of Acharya Rajneesh. “Life is a celebration. Celebrate every day of your life.”
