Sand artist and Padma Shri awardee Sudarsan Pattnaik creates a sculpture on New Year eve, at the beach in Puri, Odisha, Wednesday, Dec. 31, 2025.
Credit: PTI Photo
Slaves to the calendar that humans are, the new year provides us with a past and projects a future. Years are markers of human experience, and the world is, ultimately, human experience in time. The experience of the past lives in us with pleasures and sorrows, triumphs and disappointments. We are inclined, and even genetically trained, to hope for a better future. The celebrations on the last night of the year signify this hope, on which mankind has survived and evolved. It could only be the most primitive form of hope that throbbed in the amoeba in the ocean; the hope that runs through our cells, driving us to the stars we have trained our minds on.
When we move into the new year, we turn a page, as the cliché goes. The new page belongs to us as individuals and as members of the community, society, nation, and the world where we belong. It is difficult to disentangle the lives we live at all these levels. The idea that we are others, too, and that we live our lives at other levels, sharing them with wider congregations, gives our new year greater gravity and relevance. This is why New Year’s is a collective celebration, moving across the globe from east to west, sweeping everybody’s past away and ushering in a common future. So when the clear, young morning emerges from the blur and noise of the night, it is everybody’s day and year.
That is the ideal new year, but we live in the real world, broken into 8 billion minds, claimed by 200 governments, riven by wars, divided by ideologies and religions, and threatened with extinction by the shifting climate. In the new year, there are millions of new years, each with its happiness, sadness, memories, and forgetting. We live in a world hit by hate and torn by strife, and are subjected to regular, intensive revisions of identities. The new dawn is clouded by confusion, disruption, and uncertainties. But it has always been so. The words the first man is supposed to have spoken to the first woman are that they lived in an age of crisis. The sense of crisis has always hung over our lives across ages, but the rainbow of hope has also brightened them up and spurred us on. Every day is a day of crisis and of hope, but hope takes us through. It does so this year too.