Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Withdrawal Symptoms every New Year!


Withdrawal Symptoms every New Year!

By:Rajbir Deswal
Yes, consciously or otherwise, one does feel the withdrawal symptoms in the New Year. These may be of different kinds with different people. Yet, a feeling of correcting some wrong, of which one is habitual for the past some time, takes the better of him, not only in his actions but the thinking process as well.
Most people would continue to write the date as if it belonged to the year gone by. And then with some effort they’d amend it, reassuring themselves of the continuum of existence in the New Year. The correction thus made confirms the hangover of the year that rolled into eternity, never to return.
The withdrawal syndrome fills one with a sense of loss in so far as the diaries and calendars are concerned. But this loss is compensated in acquisition of the new ones with uncrumpled and crisp pages with unruffled folds. The contents of the old diaries may still have nostalgic notes stored for posterity but the promise that the blank slots hold balances the psychological depravity.
The most obsolete thing and rightly to be treated as such should be the “year’s holiday-list”. I personally am thrilled to have a new one. And since the indolence and lethargy that had been squeezed out to the exuberance of this old list, it deserves to be filled with some alternate and refreshing replenishment. A new holiday-list is the panacea to ward off gone-year withdrawal symptoms found mostly in the Indian babudom.
The emotional fools make New Year resolutions to stand by, but in many cases they do not live up to their commitments and promises made to themselves since if they were so strong-willed, they wouldn’t wait for the turn of the year for effecting their resolve. They feel the gone-year withdrawal symptoms more than anyone else. This is so, also because, mostly the New Year resolutions are on giving up vices and less on acquiring virtues.
Well, the business types would do stocktaking exactly when the old year-ends and new one begins for they generally had had some deity or the other’s blessing for a fixed duration. The fortunetellers also guide the “stars” of their destiny in an already announced time slot. They too need some counseling to overcome to gone year withdrawal symptoms.
Call me mad, or even selfish, but this year I have decided on an altogether different way to come out of the gone year withdrawal symptoms and keep feeling elated when friends would call for nearly a week at least to greet and wish” Happy New Year” to me. Want to know it? Well, I will not say and thus share; and thus exhaust or empty, my own good wishes but will only receive them for their therapeutic properties. Thank you friends in advance!

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