If you were to ring out 2009 listening to Ella Fitzgerald breathing ‘Blue Moon’ in her whiskey-soaked voice, you would be on the right track. This year, things come to a close with a rare celestial phenomenon, a blue moon that is upon us after 19 years. If the mood is mellow, it is because this has been a year that best fits the adage: the more things change, the more they remain the same.
As always, politics dominated our thoughts with the grand old party sliding into office yet again, leaving the BJP a saffron shade of pale. But in the US, there were no shades of grey, black replaced white as Barack Obama realised Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream.’ If a soft-spoken economist led the victory march for the Congress here once again, the stormy petrels of the Left were left whistling in the dark when nothing went right for them. So the man who would be king Prakash Karat found that 2009 was his annus horribilis. The benefits of being a lumbering elephant as thoroughbreds raced past came home when India weathered the global meltdown which saw the suits jumping off ledges and hallowed companies passing the hat around. Gordon Geeko’s motto ‘greed is good’ became passé, though not for want of trying especially on Wall Street.
Change slowly creaked into the behemoth education system but many lessons still need to be learnt. And justice for all became a possibility as the powerful bit the dust at the hands of the small people, the latest being the Ruchika Girhotra case. By our volatile standards, a tame year really as the decade draws to a close. But we can live with that, can’t we? So, ‘we’ll take a cup of kindness yet/ for auld lang syne.’ Have a wonderful and safe New Year.
{{/usCountry}}Change slowly creaked into the behemoth education system but many lessons still need to be learnt. And justice for all became a possibility as the powerful bit the dust at the hands of the small people, the latest being the Ruchika Girhotra case. By our volatile standards, a tame year really as the decade draws to a close. But we can live with that, can’t we? So, ‘we’ll take a cup of kindness yet/ for auld lang syne.’ Have a wonderful and safe New Year.
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