New Year Resolutions

If I had abided by all my new year resolutions, I would have been a saint by now. I stopped making new year resolutions when I realised that none of my resolutions met any fulfilment beyond a couple of days or utmost a week. But as I’m entering the year which will make me a sexagenarian – a senior citizen – resolutions began to queue up at the threshold of my heart.

I made rendezvous with each of them and resolved to choose two. One being a very personal affair, it won’t find a mention here. The other is about my writing.

Your writing offends too many people, the resolution-candidate said. Moreover, nothing much is achieved by pointing out people’s errors to them. Turn positive.

Okay, I say. I shall enter the last phase of a man’s dharma: sannyasa. I hereby renounce all cravings for a better government, a better nation and a better life.

No, you don’t have to renounce anything yet. Death will demand such renunciation in due course of time.

The mention of death diverts my attention. If you know you haven’t too many years left on this earth, what will you do? I ask myself. I’ll come to terms with the given reality and surrender with a beatific smile.

That’s good, the candidate says. Resistance is of no use, anyway, and will only make the end more miserable. Dying with a smile on your lips is the best you can do to yourself as well as others. But there’s time yet for that. Bring smiles to people now when there’s time yet.

The headlines in the newspapers lying on my little table snarl at me. “Beware of IT and ED raids, warns BJP leader,” reads one headline. It’s about a leader who was warning the film people of Kerala not to protest the new Citizenship Act. Another headline quotes a Haryana MLA who threatened to kill all protesters within an hour. A woman who calls herself a sadhvi and is an MP though she was a terrorist earlier labels all the people who protest against the new Act as antinational. A man who calls himself a yogi and is a chief minister allows crimes happen in his state with a specific political goal.

Everybody knows these things, my resolution-candidate says. Do you think people are fools? You don’t have to draw their attention to these things. They know them. They are the ones who perpetrate these crimes, aren’t they? Or they are the victims. It’s perpetrators or victims. Neither need your highlights of these things. They need someone to touch their hearts. The heart sees more clearly than the eyes.

I accept this candidate. I resolve to exercise my heart in the new year.