Subir Roy: New Year's devalued

OFFBEAT

Time was when new year's eve was fun. It still is but you've got to be careful. The first winter we spent in Delhi, we made it a point to take a quick vacation at the year-end to go to Kolkata, because, where else can you spend new year's eve the way it ought to be? And we were not disappointed. Calcutta Club had known better days. But what it had lost by way of slightly frayed upholstery not being replaced on time or the crockery getting downgraded with every replacement, it had made up through the robustness of spirit that showed no sign of waning.

We had of course not made the mistake of going to any of the establishments on Park Street. You cannot land at your chosen address on a helicopter, so the thought of wading through the crowds on the road, daunting not just in terms of quantity but quality, made the decision easy. The last time I have been to Park Street at the year-end was as a boy with my father who took me there in the early evening to see the lights. The lights went off in the Naxalite years and have come back, but maybe a bit of the spirit is gone for good.

How else will you explain what happened on Park Street this new year's eve? An officer who was not a gentleman made a nuisance of himself and got hauled up to the nearest police station where he should have spent the few hours to daybreak coming to his senses. Instead, his friends came in full force, semi-automatics on the ready, ransacked the police station, took away their colleague and let off the other drunks who were behind bars.

The spirit of the old times was for the anglicised Bengali gentleman and his many friends from all over the country who had made a cosmopolitan city their home to relish year after year one of the better takeaways from the colonial past. As the clock struck midnight at that great institution left behind by the colonials called the Club, the tie would at best loosen a little so that you could let in the air.

It is not as if Kolkata alone has declined. Once I got to know Bangalore, its average citizen's attitude to the city centre on new year's eve was a revelation. Stay away from M G Road and environs, they warned. As the clock approaches midnight, only louts and drunks go there to make a mockery of the spirit of Yuletide.

So what happens to the posh hotels on the street and the good business they do at the yearend, I wondered. The downside has been building up over the years and unravelled this year. The hotels simply decided not to do that kind of business. Only one hotel, that too away from the city centre, decided to organise a big do. Their earlier experience was that even if a lot of corporates bought a lot of covers, these mostly got handed down and in the process, guest quality deteriorated.

One way to ring in the new year, guaranteed to succeed, is to go to the hills. Not to Shimla, of course, where the crowd on the mall challenges the one in Connaught Place, but to go as far away as possible where the night will be chilly and the air clear and, god willing, it may even snow. And should you be a Bangalore resident, the sensible thing will be to go to Coorg and enjoy a glorious home stay at one of the coffee plantations where the air is as clear and the night as still.

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