Subir Roy: New Year's Eve in Mysore

OFF BEAT/ Nothing happened, and that was great

There are many ways of ringing out the old year and blinking in the new before you doze off in deference to the fact that you are no longer as zestful as you were a couple of decades ago.

One of the better ways is to find yourself in Mysore for no greater reason than to simply do a quick getaway to tell yourself that it is no ordinary weekend but a rare one on which the year also ends.

The yearend in India has never been the same ever since its politically correct leaders decided that with the foreign rulers gone, there was no good reason why the angrezi New Year's Day should be a public holiday anymore.

So, if you are young enough to have a decent hangover in the new year and not junior enough to bunk the day without anyone at office noticing, you have no option but to come to office and nurse your hangover there.

The great thing about hangovers is that they are effectively killed by the time you down your first pre-lunch drink. But a normal person who is not an alcoholic and who is not so abnormal as not to have a hangover on the New Year's Day surely cannot start drinking from well before lunch.

So those long hours between the strong sunrise coffee and the mid-day drink are as near to self-inflicted torture as you can think up.

So when that rare new year promises to dawn on a Saturday, saving everybody the charade of attending office with a monumental hangover, you don't want to miss out on the hangover or the boozing that comes before it.

Only that you wish it had come a couple of decades earlier when you could do justice to it.

Mysore does not swing on New Year's Eve. I am sure it does behind some closed doors and within the precincts of a few clubs. But the streets, unlike the major ones of Bangalore, are blessedly free from either excessive traffic or revellers who have come to see the lights and can't find a place to sit down.

And if you know your onions or more correctly your burgers, you can do worse than go down to Kalidasa Road and order extra ones to make up for the missing pegs that you can no longer carry off.

Downtown, with about three tables and a set-back counter in a room the size of an ordinary shop, sits just off a pleasant brightly lit shopping street.

In size and brightness, it is not a patch on the Café Coffee Day that is just opposite the road. But the quite, trendy youngsters who talk softly at the tables either prefer to whisper to their companions or are connoisseurs of burgers or both.

Because, there are not many eateries in the country that make a tastier mayonnaise and coleslaw that go into those burgers.

Our family has made lengthy detours while passing Mysore, to or back from Ooty or Coorg, just to be able to pick up an evening's supply of those heavenly burgers.

And there are few more disappointing moments I can recall than when on one such visit we found that the shop was closed for the afternoon.

We couldn't spare the additional hours to wait for it to open and that is when we decided that once we would come for a quiet couple of days to the city to do nothing, but simply drive every evening to Downtown to pick up a lavish supply of its burgers and make a royal dinner of it.

My wife and I have over the years become health conscious. We try to avoid cheese and mayonnaise, which god must have made very early during his creative week when he was at his innovative best. But rules are meant to be broken once in a while, particularly during a weekend that plays host to the yearend.

So there we were, having placed the order and told to come back in 20 minutes for the pizzas for the children to be ready, taking a quiet walk down some of the most peaceful and pleasant side streets that any city suburb can boast of, wondering where Bangalore had lost its way and whether someone could prevent Mysore from doing the same.

Great burgers taste heavenly, but they go down better with an additional peg of rum thrown in to mark the yearend. It helps if you are in a peaceful hotel, with the rest of the guests culturally far removed from New Year Eve's revelry.

It doesn't matter if a TV channel is playing out a poor remake of Pretty Woman in the guise of a Maid in Manhattan. Then, as if to remind us that we are not holidaying in Mars, the hotel across the park lets loose a string of fireworks that blossom flowers in the inky sky.

Then muted crackers put-put through the closed glass windows to remind that it is the hour of 12 and will we please shake off our quietness momentarily and welcome 2005.

As a family we have wished in a new year in some very novel ways. Among the most depressing was in a shabby motel on the Delhi-Jaipur highway where we were stuck for the night by the same fog to escape from which we had impulsively decided to get into the car and drive to Rajasthan.

Among the most silently exciting was in the Madhya Pradesh Tourism hotel in Bandhavgarh, waiting for the first light to strike so that we could go out in the jeep, well covered in our woollens, to say happy new year to the tigers.

The evening in Mysore was neither depressing nor exciting, but so pleasurably comfortable in a totally non-eventful way. It bore the hallmark of the late afternoon years of life, quite some way yet from sunset but certainly past the high noon of zestful boozing and classical hangovers.