Maybe it’s because Santa’s just been around and the weather is bracing, but on balance, I really do think 2017 hasn’t been all that bad. At all, in fact, if you think about it.
This will be the last column of the seventeenth year of the twenty-first century, and in the time honored tradition of all columnists everywhere, this column could have been about one of two things. I could either have prognosticated and pontificated about what 2018 is going to be like, or I could have passed my eye over the events of 2017. I have, as you bloodhounds may have already noticed, plumped for the latter.
P-and-p-ing shouldn’t be attempted in the age of Trump, really. Predicting the future is a mug’s game at the best of times, but in the age of the carrot top, it is positively fraught with danger. Throw in his sibling from another maternal figure, Kim Jong Un, and making it alive through the next year will be an achievement.
But enough of the bleak and uncertain future. Let us focus on the year that went by, and about how it wasn’t all that horrible.
Globally, we didn’t blow ourselves up, and that ought to count as an achievement in these troubled times. The American economy seems to be chugging along, although on exactly what is not known to anybody, and they seem to be pulling the rest of us along with them. Long may the magic carpet ride last. China huffed and puffed at Doklam, but we huffed and puffed just as much, and that seems to have died down for the moment, thank god.
What about India in 2017? On the plus side, all my currency notes were mine for all twelve months, and that was a distinct improvement on 2016.
Second, my well known propensity for forgetting people’s names stopped mattering, since people’s names stopped mattering. Your Aadhaar’s where it’s at, baby. Third, GST provided us all with many hours of confusion, outrage and utter befuddlement on multiple levels, helping us pass our time more effectively. So overall, not all that bad a year.
And what of my beloved Pune? They dug up some roads, beautified some others, and continued to claim that Pune is a smart city, so nothing much changed there. The rains were good, so no water cuts until May, at least. And credit where credit’s due: the government recently announced that bars can now stay open until one-thirty in the morning, which is a Monumentally Good Thing. Taxes on stuff that you can quaff in those bars are higher than teenagers at twenty minutes past four in the afternoon, but still – one must count one’s blessing.
And personally, if you ask me, we made it through all of 2017 without the Metro turning our lives into a living hell. That was our best and biggest achievement, without a shadow of a doubt.
In the faint and fond hope that 2018 will be similarly Metro-free, here’s wishing all of you a very happy 2018, and one helluva party on the 31st. Cheers!
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#All views expressed in this column are those of the columnist and Pune365 does not necessarily subscribe to them.
He doesn't expect the paradox to be resolved in his lifetime
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