New Year Resolutions for Pongal

Pic courtesy: Mash Kolams

New Year resolutions are damnable things. Mostly they are social media worthy which means it involves all things supercilious bedecked in the paraphernalia of the profound. Folks are always resolving to eat healthy, stop and smell the farts roses, go with the flow, get away from the rat race, travel and see the world, quit smoking, tweet less, smile more, pay it forward, help the needy, and make the world a better place. Needless to say these resolutions are burdensome creatures and make you feel like Frodo Baggins crushed and overwhelmed under the onerous weight of the One Ring. Which probably explains why most of us feel a pressing obligation to break them as quickly as we can so that we can go back to being flawed human beings who are conceited and callous enough not to care about self – improvement or improving the lot of the less fortunate.

            How do I know these things? From personal experience of course. I had resolved to eat right, stop allowing my insecurities to become an obsession and cease revealing embarrassing details about myself when I write up these columns. But hardly two weeks into the New Year, I have failed to convince my body that it doesn’t need desserts after every meal, haven’t managed a full night’s sleep because I am trying to figure out how to become a more successful author or a self – actualized individual and you know…

When confronted with definitive evidence of a weak will and an inability to resist temptation, guilt kicks in and claws at your underbelly making you feel lower than a worm’s belly button. All too soon, one is trapped in a vicious cycle of resolutions made only to be broken and on and on it goes. Perhaps we have gotten the methodology all wrong.

            The problem is we are making resolutions to do things we have been taught to think we ought to be doing instead of the things we really want to do. Which is why we end up like those god-awful souls who judge us when we order a double chocolate chip cookie milkshake with whipped cream and ice cream to go with the garden salad with the add - on meat and insist on viewing entire areas of a perfectly decent life as inadequate. Why not simply admit that ‘I’m not okay, you’re not okay and that’s okay!’? I first heard that in the Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn classic, Dodgeball and that is not at all an embarrassing thing to admit because I am owning it now see?

            Perhaps your New Year resolution made just in time for Pongal ought to be not to make any, except that would qualify as a bona – fide resolution so what now? I know exactly what I will be doing. Now that I have made the word count for my column, I am just going to drop the whole thing and go grab a cupcake. Then I’ll probably stay up all night wondering what it is that Twinkle Khanna has and I don’t which ensures that she manages astronomical sales figures for her yarns on pads, Prasad and pyjamas while looking so damn good.

This article originally appeared in The Sunday Standard.