(Or: Why I am No Longer Allowed to Speak)

**WARNING: Reading this essay may cause the universe to notice you are having a good day. If you value your current state of bliss and non-catastrophe, please read this while wearing a protective layer of aluminum foil and a facial expression that suggests you have just received a large, unexpected tax bill.**

As a graduate of IIT Madras, my brain was programmed to believe that the entire universe is governed by the laws of Physics, the equations of Mathematics, and the absolute certainty that if you have enough data points and a sufficiently powerful calculator, you can predict everything from the trajectory of a proton to why the office coffee tastes like melted tires.

I spent decades as a “business guy,” a title that basically means I ran around pretending that “feelings” were just unquantified data artifacts that could be eliminated with a robust enough spreadsheet. In my world, if the system crashed, you didn’t perform a ritual dance. You found the bug, patched the code, and moved to the next sprint. I was a professional practitioner of “Brutal Logic,” a mindset very effective for corporate warfare but about as useful for managing relationships as a flamethrower for making an omelet. I was, in other words, a complete idiot.

I am now in my fifties. I have discovered that life’s most complex systems – like marriage, relationships, peace of mind and smoke detectors – do not, in fact, respond to a high-priority trouble ticket. I am starting to suspect that my mother and my wife, neither of whom has ever optimized a global supply chain, are actually much more sophisticated architects of reality than I am.

In Indian culture, we don’t just have bad weeks. We “go through Bad Times.” This is spoken of as if it were a sentient, malicious weather pattern involving the planet Saturn, a specific misalignment of the stars, and something to do with lentils. But the heavyweight champion of Indian cultural phenomena is “Nazar” – the dreaded Evil Eye.

Growing up, I watched my mother wave salt over my head to ward off envy with the intellectual superiority of a man who understands the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Her rituals were “charming legacy bugs” in our cultural software, or so I thought. I figured “bad times” was just a convenient excuse for people to justify being a jerk. ‘Why blame the poor universe if you just can’t get your act together, pal?’

I was wrong. It turns out the bug is actually the entire operating system.

About a year ago, in a moment of reckless, suicidal gratitude, I committed the ultimate blunder: I said things out loud. I looked at the sum total of my life – my wonderful wife, my brilliant daughters, my rock-solid siblings, my incredible in-laws and my amazing friends – and I told another human being, “I couldn’t have asked for better.”

In the old world of logic and business, that’s a mere observation. In the world my wife and mom inhabit, that’s like walking into a lion cage wearing a suit made of raw steaks. I might as well have sent a calendar invite to the Universe titled: PLEASE STRESS-TEST MY LIFE UNTIL I CRY COPIOUS AMOUNTS OF TEARS.

Soon, the turbulence hit. Relationships I thought were “impregnable” – a word used only by people who have clearly never met a determined toddler or the Universe – suddenly began to show hairline fractures.

I, the guy who reads Vedanta and ponders Buddhist equanimity for fun, suddenly realized I was the problem. I was the source of the fractures. I was the one creating the “bad times.” As it turned out, I couldn’t even manage a civil conversation about where we should go for dinner without it turning into a three-act Greek tragedy. While I’ll readily admit that I have displayed the (im)maturity of a Republican POTUS, I’ll also put a equal part of the blame on Nazar, the Universe and the Bureau of Out-of-control Karma.

The most humbling part is watching my family. My wife, my daughters, my parents, and my in-laws all seem to practice the principles I struggle to internalize. My mom, in particular, navigates life with a natural grace that I can’t achieve even after three hours of staring at a wall and trying to be “present.” I may have the user manual for the Atman memorized in three languages, but they’re the ones actually running the code in production. Like I said, it has all been very humbling. Did I say humbling?

The fifties are an awkward age. We are at a point in our lives where we are not old enough to be old, the “Wise Elders” – the kind who sits on porch swings, dispenses profound life lessons, and is allowed to fall asleep in public without anyone calling 911.

On the flip side, we are also not young enough to be “Young.” We are at that stage of biological betrayal where we can no longer eat a slice of pizza after 8:00 PM without experiencing heartburn so intense it could heat a mid-sized home in San Jose.

We are essentially teenagers again, but with a few soul-destroying upgrades. We have the same crushing angst and the same terrifying feeling that we don’t know what we’re doing, except now we have significantly higher cholesterol, more money to spend on things we don’t need or understand, and a mountain of responsibilities that would make Atlas ask for a weekend off. It’s a “Second Adolescence” where the pimples have been replaced by mortgage payments, and instead of worrying if we’ll get a date, we worry about whether the “clunk” in the Audi is an invitation to buy a mechanic a new boat.

We are all silently taking stock, squinting at the massive delta between our youthful ambitions – where we were all going to be Nobel-prize-winning-physicist-astronaut-rockstars – and our current reality, which mostly involves trying to remember why we walked into the kitchen.

Luckily, I’ve been rescued by the voices of wisdom in my house: my wife and my daughters. They are my guardrails. They remind me that being “right” is not nearly as important as being “kind.” I feel a pang of terror even writing this. To speak of their wisdom is basically begging for a celestial piano to fall on my head from the top of a very high building.

I’m retiring the logical mindset. It served me well in the corporate trenches, but it’s time to part ways. I’m leaning into the “tools of the heart”: love, empathy, and a healthy dose of keeping my mouth shut. I’ve realized that the most precious parts of my life thrive best in the shade, away from the public eye.

If you see me today, I’ll tell you things are “fine.” I might even complain about the traffic or the fact that a cup of coffee costs as much as a small car. It’s not that I don’t feel lucky. I really do. It’s just that my wife is right. (I can see her laughing and saying “Duh, I know” from here). The universe is listening, and sometimes, the most logical thing a man can do is keep his mouth shut and his blessings hidden deep in his pocket.

–

A Formal Petition to the Universe (c/o The Bureau of Excessive Karma)

TO: The Universe (including, but not limited to: The Great Void, Saturn, The Evil Eye, and that specific subset of Fate that enjoys tripping people when they are inserting USB drives into laptops).

FROM: An IIT alum who should have known better.

SUBJECT: Please Ignore Me. I Am Not Even Here.

Dear Universe,

I am writing this because I recently wrote the above essay. In it, I mentioned several things that could be construed as “positive.” I used words like “blessed,” “wonderful,” and “impregnable.”

I would like to state, for the official record, that I was clearly hallucinating.

I want to be absolutely clear: My life is a disaster. A complete and utter train wreck. If you were looking at me and thinking, “Hey, that guy looks like he’s got his act together; let’s drop a metaphorical safe on his head,” please reconsider.

Let the record show:

My “wonderful” children are actually highly sophisticated intelligence agents designed to expose my ignorance of pronouns. My wife, “my source of wisdom,” is actually the person who spends her days marveling at how a man who ran large businesses can be defeated by a simple kitchen appliance. My “Vedantic wisdom” is mostly just me forgetting where I parked my car and pretending I’m contemplating the void. My “incredible” in-laws view me as a confusing science project they’ve agreed to tolerate mainly because they do not want their daughter to move back home. My siblings and I aren’t “rock-solid.” We are simply trapped in a lifelong Mexican Standoff. We only stay close because we have enough incriminating material on each other. My friends aren’t “solid support systems.” They are a group of immature middle-aged men who groan about lower back pain and discuss geopolitics on WhatsApp as a desperate diversion from the fact they no longer have hair or can read a menu without a high-powered flashlight and a team of ophthalmologists.

Furthermore, I would like to point out that I am currently in my fifties. As you know, this is the “Second Adolescence,” which means I am already being punished by a metabolic system that considers a single slice of pizza to be a declaration of war. I have a mysterious pain in my left knee that appears only when it rains, and I frequently forget why I walked into a room. I am basically an overgrown toddler with a mortgage.

So, if you’re looking for someone to “humble,” please keep moving. I am already very, very humble. I am the humblest guy you’ve ever met. In fact, I’m probably the world champion of humility, though I would never tell anyone because that would be bragging, which would attract Nazar, and we’ve already established that I’m not doing that.

Please direct all Evil Eyes, “Bad Times,” and Saturn-related malfunctions toward supercilious vegans, rude people, and Ted Cruz. I’m just a guy in San Jose playing Wordle on my phone.

Thank you for your lack of attention.

Sincerely,

I honestly don’t even know who I am.

Same chaos, different time zone

When I left India in 1989, I was fleeing a very specific kind of chaos. I was escaping the bureaucracy where a simple signature required three bribes, ten passport photos, and a blood sample. I was leaving a culture where time was a philosophical concept rather than a practical construct.

I arrived in America expecting the Promised Land. Lo and behold, it was. For a while.

I remember walking into a grocery store in Columbus, Ohio and weeping softly in the cereal aisle. There were forty kinds of flakes. The floor was so clean I could have eaten off it, and the girl at the check out counter told me to “Have a nice day” with such aggressive friendliness I assumed she was flirting with me. She wasn’t. She was just being American.

In those days, America felt different from the India of my youth. In India, everything was a struggle. Here, everything was automatic. You booked a car, it was there. You bought a plane ticket, you got a seat. I felt I had arrived in a country where competence was the baseline, not the exception. Eventually, I parked my anxieties next to my oversized sedan and settled into the quiet, predictable rhythm of a suburbia in the First World.

Sadly, America has changed, not always for the worse. It seems that while I was busy assimilating, making a living and raising a family, America was busy becoming the India of my childhod.

It started slowly. It wasn’t the roads that cracked first. It was the competence. I used to marvel that in America, things “just worked.* Now, American customer service has evolved into a sophisticated form of gaslighting. Flying has become less like travel and more like a cattle drive run by people who hate cows. Hotels treat clean towels like a negotiable perk. Politicians have gone from carefully hiding their deficiencies to openly flaunting them. The cancer of corruption has taken hold in public service.

I left India hoping it would eventually cure itself of its legendary ineptitude. I never imagined that instead, America would catch the virus. We are becoming incompetent in a way that feels chillingly familiar. The “Can-Do” spirit that once exemplified America has been replaced by the “The System is Down” shrug. It is a cruel irony. I moved halfway across the world to escape dysfunction, only to watch my adopted home eagerly import it.

But the most jarring transformation is the national mood. I grew up in a place where people argued passionately, loudly, and endlessly. They still do. I moved here for the “civil discourse,” key word being civil. Now, I watch the news and realize that America has adopted the Bollywood model of conflict resolution: high drama, zero logic, and everyone dancing to a different tune.

The polarization here is truly staggering. In India, we have thousands of years of complex social history to justify our divisions. America has managed to achieve the same level of tribalism in the time it took to introduce the iPhone. Neighbors who once borrowed sugar from each other now stare across the lawn like rival warlords because of a yard sign. The famous American “melting pot” feels less like a fondue and more like a pressure cooker where the safety valve has been welded shut.

To add to the existential dread, I now have to contend with the WhatsApp forwards from the motherland. Friends who stayed behind seem to view America’s stumbling as a spectator sport. They send me breathless video clips about the “End of Western Hegemony” with a tone that I can only describe as giddy.

It feels personal. When I left thirty years ago, I didn’t send back postcards celebrating their inflation rates. I wanted them to do well. Yet, they seem strangely vindicated by my new reality, as if my discomfort proves that staying put was the superior strategic choice. It is a peculiar betrayal – to realize that the people you grew up with are quietly rooting for the roof to cave in on your head, mostly so they can say the architecture was always unstable. I am tempted to retort with something clever that makes me feel better. I refrain. It doesn’t make me feel better to do that anymore.

So, I look toward the future with a complicated cocktail of optimism and heartburn. The heartburn might just be the age, but I suspect it is the existential dread of realizing there is nowhere left to run. If America falters, where do I go? There is no “Super America” waiting in the wings. Mars is not an option, in spite of Elon’s best efforts to market it. I hear the commute is terrible and the Wi-Fi is nonexistent. I am, quite literally, at the end of the line.

Perhaps this convergence between my two homes is not a tragedy. Perhaps it is a strange and new kind of kinship, one that no one wanted in the first place. And yet here we are. To my friends in India, I say: put down the popcorn and offer a hand. We are beginning to look a lot like each other, and we could use the tips on how to manage the chaos without losing our minds.

And to us here in America: maybe the efficiency I missed was never the soul of this country, just the packaging. Now the packaging is torn. It is messy, and things don’t work the way they used to. But we are still here. We are all – from Chennai to Chicago – stuck in the same messy, imperfect struggle to live together without tearing each other apart.

Perhaps that is the ultimate hope. Democracy isn’t a vending machine where you insert a vote and get a perfect society. It’s a potluck dinner where half the people bring wine and the other half bring grievances. It is annoying, yes. But as long as we are all still at the table, arguing over the menu, we haven’t given up.

I guess we are all just trying to keep the lights on and the conversation going. And if a billion people on the other side of the world can survive the slings and arrows of outrageous (mis) fortune with a smile and a song in their hearts, maybe we can too. I will keep my passport renewed, of course, but I will also keep tuning my acoustic guitar. It is getting harder to hear the melody over the noise. The strings seem to snap more often these days. But the wood is still good, and even if the song is starting to sound a little out of tune, I’m going to keep playing it.

God bless America. God bless India. God bless you wherever you are.

Have a great rest of the week.

It’s still only January

It is January, which is traditionally the month when Americans, fresh off the holiday season, grimly resolve to improve their lives by eating only kale and joining a gym that they will visit exactly twice before realizing that “exercise” is just a fancy word for “sweating in a room that smells like despair.”

Usually, January is a quiet time. A boring time. A time for paying bills and regretting the purchase of the inflatable lawn Santa. But not this year. No, the Federal Government of the United States has decided that 2026 is going to be the year it completely stops taking its medication.

I am not making this up. If you have been following the news for the last three weeks, you are probably thinking: Surely you are exaggerating, Dr What Ho!. Surely the world’s leading superpower did not just try to buy an arctic island, accidentally invade South America, break up with doctors and charge a cover fee for world peace.

To which I say: Ha ha. You clearly underestimate the American capacity for what technical experts call “High-Octane Weirdness.”

Let’s start with the “Board of Peace.”

This sounds like a board game that you play with your family on a rainy Sunday, which ends three hours later when grandpa throws the dice at the cat because he landed on “Nuclear Winter.” But it is actually a real thing that President Trump announced at Davos.

The concept is simple: To join the Board of Peace, a country must pay – and I swear I am not making this up – One Billion Dollars.

That is the entry fee. It’s like a Country Club for geopolitics, only instead of getting access to a golf course and a mediocre buffet, you get to sit in a room and nod while the United States explains why wind turbines are actually secret listening devices for whales.

Naturally, this caused some kerfuffles. For example, Canada – a nation that is essentially a large, polite block of ice populated by people who chug maple syrup and apologize to trees when they bump into them – raised a hand and asked if maybe peace should be, you know, free?

The response from the White House was immediate: Canada was uninvited. They were kicked out. Banned from the treehouse. Trump basically told Prime Minister Mark Carney that Canada only exists because we allow it to, which is the diplomatic equivalent of telling your upstairs neighbor that you could technically burn his apartment down whenever you wanted to, so he’d better stop complaining about your loud music.

So now the Board of Peace is just the US and whoever else has a spare billion dollars lying around, while Canada stands outside in the snow, pressing its nose against the glass and mouthing, “Sorry.”

But the administration was not done. Having solved World Peace by turning it into a pay-per-view event, they turned their eyes to Global Real Estate.

Specifically, Greenland.

Alert readers of What Ho! will recall that a few years ago, the US tried to buy Greenland, and Denmark said no. Well, apparently, “No” is just Danish for “Try again in 2026,” because we are back at it. We want to buy Greenland.

Why? Nobody knows. Maybe we need more ice. Maybe we want to corner the market on polar bears. Maybe the President looked at a map, saw a big white space, and thought, “That would be a great place for a casino.” The Danes are currently responding with the weary patience of a parent explaining to a toddler that they cannot buy the moon, no matter how shiny it looks.

But Greenland was just the appetizer. The main course was Venezuela.

In a move that surprised literally everyone, including probably all the people involved, the US military apparently arrested the President of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife. And then – this is the best part – President Trump announced that the United States would “temporarily run the nation.”

“Temporarily run.”

It sounds so casual, doesn’t it? Just two words doing a massive amount of heavy lifting in geopolitical communications. It’s like we’re house-sitting. Like we’re just going to pop down to South America, water the plants, feed the cat, and maybe overthrow the local junta while we’re there. It’s the “Pop-Up Shop” model of imperialism. We’re not conquering you; we’re just doing a limited-time management takeover until we find a manager who agrees with us about everything.

Meanwhile, back home, the excitement continued with “Operation Metro Surge” in Minnesota, which sounds like a caffeinated soft drink but is actually a massive crackdown involving ICE agents. It has been controversial, mostly because the White House released a photo of a protester that had been digitally altered to make her look like she was crying.

That’s right. The Federal Government is now using the “Crying Filter.”

We are at the point where the Department of Homeland Security is operating with the maturity level of a 14-year-old on TikTok. I assume next week they will release a press release written entirely in emojis, featuring a picture of the Canadian Prime Minister with the “Dog Ears” filter.

And through it all, there is Trump.

You have to admire the man’s stamina. Or, more accurately, the lack of it. In the middle of all this – the annexations, the peace fees, the diplomatic feuds – President Trump attended a roundtable discussion on milk prices and fell asleep.

I am not criticizing him here. I have attended meetings about milk prices. If you have never been to a meeting about milk prices, let me tell you: It is not a thrill ride. It is not Avengers: Endgame. It is a bunch of people in suits debating 2% vs whole milk until your soul leaves your body.

So there was the Leader of the Free World, head bobbing, fighting the Sandman, while his cabinet discussed dairy subsidies. The White House later denied he was sleeping, claiming his “mental sharpness is second to none.” Which is exactly what I say when my wife catches me napping during a show that we watch together. “I wasn’t sleeping!” I say. “Hey, my mental sharpness is second to none!”

He also apparently dozed off during a meeting about cannabis, which, to be fair, is probably the most appropriate reaction to have at a meeting about cannabis.

The US withdrew from the World Health Organization. Let’s face it: America and the WHO are the “Ross and Rachel” of international relations. We were on a break, then we were back, and now we’re breaking up again because we apparently want to see other health organizations. Who knows, maybe if we stop talking to the doctors, the diseases will get the hint and go away.

So, to recap: We are selling memberships to a Peace Club. We are trying to buy the Arctic. We are substitute-teaching Venezuela. We are Photoshopping tears onto protesters. Our President is napping during dairy summits; and we are seeing other health organizations.

It is only January 25th. We’re no longer a country. We’re now a relentless content machine on Tik tok, with an influencer running the country and throwing darts at a board called “International Incidents.”

I don’t know what February holds. Maybe we will buy the Eiffel Tower and turn it into a water slide. Maybe we will declare war on the metric system. Maybe we will all just take a cue from the President, close our eyes, and hope that when we wake up, the world will have switched back to a channel that makes sense.

Have a great rest of January. Keep a billion dollars ready. Just in case.

‘Tis a new dawn. ‘Tis a new day.

Time is funny business. Some say it is an arrow that moves only forward. Some say that it is a wheel. A cycle of what goes around that comes around. If you subscribe to the idea of linear time, then I suppose new years and birthdays are useful markers, junctions at which to pause before picking up the knapsack and trudging on.

I will turn 58 years old in 2026. I can’t say it feels any different from 2025 or the year before that, and yet I can sense that the arrow of time has shot just a little further ahead from a year ago. Time is funny business. In the early years, you’re hardly aware of it stalking you. I can’t remember paying attention to time until maybe the tenth grade when I had my own watch. The HMT device, which was oversized for my wrist, was gifted to me so I could keep track of the hours during exams that were designed as much for time management as they were to test your knowledge of hydrocarbons. Prior to that, it was always someone else’s task, usually appa’s or amma’s, to keep us on schedule, whether to catch the train and get to school.

Inevitably, time became part of the daily vocabulary. There was today, tomorrow, the short term, the long term, the temporary and the permanent, the past and the future, and so on. A lot of time has been spent on filling it up with places to go and things to do. On titles to get, bank accounts to fill and experiences to savor. Waking up one fine day like the new year’s day or a birthday, it feels like time, once a loyal companion in my quest to keep pace with it, is passing me by. I am now squarely in what they call middle age.

Middle age isn’t what it used to be. Back in the day, forty was the marker for midlife, but now, finding consensus on when middle age begins and what it represents isn’t easy. A dictionary would define it as “the period in your life when you are no longer young but have not yet become old”. A 2018 survey reported that most Americans aged between 40 and 64 considered themselves middle-aged, but so did 44% of people aged between 65 and 70.

People magazine cheekily reported that the characters in ‘And Just Like That,’ the rebooted series of Sex and the City, were the same age (about 55) as the Golden Girls when they made their first outing in the mid-80s. How can that be possible? My recollection of the sequined Florida housemates was that they were teetering off their mortal coils, but then everyone seems old when you are young.

Middle age once had a purpose of sorts. It was a time that offered the stability and continuity that used to come from having a job for life. Now, it’s not just your employment that might feel precarious, but your job function or industry itself. It used to be a time when you slowed down to enjoy life. A time to take stock. Now, it reflects that you’ve still got life left in you to embrace a last hurrah. “Hold my beer while I go off on this one last jamboree.” Some feel pressured to lose pounds and reinvent themselves, to look fantastic, to not slow down or age gracefully. You can’t just be gray anymore. You’ve got to be glamorous, right?

In the past, the male midlife crisis had a well-trodden path riddled with cliches, from the red sports car to the trophy wife. These days, middle age seems to be associated more with anxiety, angst, and the search for meaning than with the quest for leather trousers. And therein lies the problem with all our “age is just a number” mental gymnastics. Dispensing with middle age is comforting because if we never own up to being in the middle, we will never have to contemplate the end. Until we are forced to, that is.

As I look ahead from the vantage point of a man about to turn 58, it strikes me that life in many ways is yet to begin. Sure, it has been filled with experiences of all sorts till date, enough to fill a phone with 10s of 1000s of images. Yet, what lies ahead promises to be richer, and more profound than anything I’ve seen before. Even as I ponder my mortality, I am forced to reckon with that of those who are dearest to me, friends and family alike. Children have grown up, finished college, and begun working. They will meet exciting new people, have their hearts broken, and have it healed, pay credit card bills and save for a down payment for a house, and marry and have kids and so on. As for me, there will be jobs to walk away from, new purposes to embrace, and there will be the inevitable march towards irrelevance and discovering a new kind of relevance. This movie is not done yet. The stuff that life is really made of is yet to unfold.

It’s not that life has been trite or wasted till now. There has been some wisdom gathered along the way. Perhaps, middle age is that part of life when you are not naive but are not wholly wise either. A lot, it seems, depends on where we go from here. The future promises to be filled with gravitas laden experiences but experience does not always lead to wisdom. It could, instead, easily result in a sullen retreat from life itself. What are we supposed to learn? That the world is changing and we must adapt with it, so we may not let our children down as they teach themselves to live in it? That we must learn to gracefully step aside so others can take our places? That nothing really lasts forever?

Perhaps it’s all of it. Perhaps it’s none of it. Time, as they say, will tell. No one ever can analyze their way into wisdom. We can only think ourselves out of foolishness. Some things cannot be taught. But they can be learned.

If the entire history of Earth were to be compressed into just ONE day, single celled life appears at 4am. Fish begin swimming in the oceans at 8pm. The dinosaurs appear at 10:40pm and go extinct an hour later by 11:40pm. Our first human ancestors appeared at 11:58pm. Modern humans appeared at 11:59:58. Ancient Greek, Egyptian, Chinese, Persian and Indian civilizations, the Torah, the Upanishads, the Dhammapada, the Bible and the Koran, the Enlightenment Age and the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the Moon Landing, the Internet, iPhones and social media, and Artificial Intelligence, and all of that – all of which considered markers of human progress – appeared in the last few seconds. You and I have been on this planet for a blink of an eye. It’s hard to take ourselves seriously, and yet we seek a purpose.

This world we live in was never meant to give us purpose. It can only give us reasons to do something or another. We can make money. We can create art. Or, we can do something that we love more than money or art. Once we’re done with all of that, what’s left but the taming of the body and the mind? We learn that the world has nothing left to offer us. And, we become free. The only reason to grow old is so we can finally set ourselves free. What is there to be gained by merely growing weaker if we become none the wiser? It is far better to die young. So much of the world changes and yet nothing about the human condition changes and very little will. In the immortal words of Adele, “they say that time’s supposed to heal ya, but I ain’t done much healing.”

Here’s to healing and growing, and laughing and losing ourselves, and weeping and finding ourselves, in this new year where the Earth begins yet another journey around the Sun. A lot can happen in a blink of an eye.

I have a lot more to say but this has already turned out longer than I wanted.

Happy 2026. Have yourselves a wonderful new year. ‘Tis a new dawn, and ‘tis a new day.

The Global Pursuit of Not Messing Up Next Year

Human beings are not generally sensible creatures, and December 31st offers the most compelling evidence of this. It is on this occasion that we collectively decide that the only thing standing between us and an imminent and total catastrophe in the coming year is a very specific set of chores involving fruit, laundry, and property damage. If you were an alien like Zuckerberg observing Earth on New Year’s Eve, you wouldn’t see a sophisticated civilization. You would see a species gripped by a chaotic, high-stakes superstitious fever dream.

While fireworks, arson and drunken revelry are generally popular universally, many cultures have deeply symbolic (and often very dangerous) traditions to ensure luck, love, and wealth for the coming year. Here are some of the unique ways cultures celebrate New Year’s Eve:

Take Spain, for example. While the rest of the world is singing Auld Lang Syne, the Spaniards are engaged in a life-or-death struggle with twelve grapes. On New Year’s Eve, you have roughly 36 seconds to shove twelve globes of fructose into your mouth in sync with a clock chime. It is the only night of the year where the leading cause of death is aggressive snacking. Success means good luck. Failure means you’ve spent the first ten seconds of the New Year choking in front of your abuela.

In Italy, people eat lentils for dinner because their round shape resembles coins, symbolizing wealth and prosperity, and also so they can squeeze in their last intake of protein so nothing dire happens the next day. The Japanese eat Toshikoshi Soba (“year-crossing noodles”). The long buckwheat noodles represent longevity, while their ease of cutting symbolizes cutting off the misfortunes of the past year, a tradition that became popular after Lorena Bobbit once visited Japan.

Meanwhile, in the Philippines, the obsession moves from quantity to geometry. Everything must be round. You eat round fruit, you wear polka dots, and you probably try to avoid square furniture. It’s a literal attempt to round out your luck, proving that on New Year’s Eve, we believe the universe operates on the logic of a Saturday morning cartoon.

Then there is the internal struggle of the Latin American fashionistas. In countries like Mexico and Colombia, your destiny is determined by your underwear. Want a promotion? Wear yellow. Want a soulmate? Wear red. It creates a stressful retail environment where you must decide, in a crowded department store, exactly which part of your life is currently the biggest disaster.

In Brazil, they simplify things by wearing all white, then running into the ocean to jump over seven waves. It’s a beautiful, spiritual gesture, until you realize thousands of people are trying to perform synchronized aquatic gymnastics in the dark while wearing wet linen.

If you survive the grapes and the waves, you still have to deal with the physical mayhem and destruction. Danes show their love for friends by smashing porcelain against their front doors. In any other month or country, this is vandalism and a cry for help. On January 1st, broken fragments of china outside your front door is just a sign that you’re popular in Denmark.

The always colorful and cheerful Scots take a more flammable approach. Known as Hogmanay, a major Scottish tradition is “First Footing.” The first person to cross your threshold after midnight, ideally a tall, dark and handsome man like me, should bring gifts like coal, whiskey, shortbread and bitcoin to ensure a lucky year. It is to be noted that this tradition involves heavy use of fireballs. The Ecuadorians burn giant effigies of people they don’t like, usually of politicians and software engineers. It’s a cathartic, smoky way of saying, “This year was terrible, and I’m going to melt it into the pavement.”

Perhaps the most relatable tradition belongs to the Colombians. At the stroke of midnight, people grab an empty suitcase and sprint around the block if they wish to travel in the new year. There is no destination. There are no clothes in the bag. It is just a person in yellow underwear, possibly still chewing a grape, running through the streets trying to frantically convince the universe they deserve a vacation.

In India, celebrating New Year’s Eve is essentially a high-stakes competitive sport where the main event is trying to navigate a shortcut that Google Maps promises will take ten minutes, but results in you becoming permanent resident at the Silk Board junction in Bangalore. In Indian cities, the night is a chaotic symphony of Bollywood remixes thumping so loud your ancestors can feel the bass, while half the population is frantically trying to book a cab that costs more than a small plot of land. In every “cool” household, there’s always a designated uncle who insists on dancing the “Naagin” (the famed Indian snake dance) the moment the clock strikes twelve, and a mother who is already planning the 6:00 AM temple visit because “while partying is fine, blessings are mandatory.” By 12:01 AM, the cellular networks have usually collapsed under the unbearable weight of three billion “Happy New Year” GIFs featuring sparkling roses and fireworks, leaving everyone to wander the streets in a blissful, noisy haze of smog and the lingering scent of chicken biryani.

In America, of course, we celebrate New Year’s eve with the lowering of objects into the void while counting down to ten, a tradition first observed by Native Americans who lowered white men slowly into vats of boiling oil. It is the only night of the year when the entire nation collectively agrees to pretend that everyone staying up past midnight is a sensible lifestyle choice rather than a slow-motion descent into madness. The ritual involves dressing in sequins and uncomfortable shoes to stand in a crowded living room, clutching a plastic cup of lukewarm sparkling cider, and staring intensely at a television screen for three hours. We then watch a giant, glowing geodesic sphere slide down a pole in Times Square, an unimpressive feat of engineering that, in any other context, would be considered a very slow elevator malfunction and then erupt into cheers as if we’ve personally conquered the passage of time. By 12:02 AM, the adrenaline vanishes, replaced by the grim realization that we are now outdoors in January, wearing party hats, and facing a three-hour Uber surge while desperately trying to remember where we left our coats and our dignity. New Year’s Eve is a magical night when all of New York City is transformed into a public toilet, and the cab drivers turn into multi-millionaires at the stroke of midnight.

I personally have been in Times Square once on New Year’s Eve and I would describe it as a once-in-a-lifetime event, meaning I would never do it again. That is because I am 142 years old now and no longer motivated by the idea of appealing to the universe for luck. Typically, Sudha and I buy two tickets for a scintillating show called “Let’s just hang out in our living rooms and try to stay awake till midnight so we can post messages on the family chat,” and then fall asleep only to wake up with a jolt twenty minutes past midnight to see messages from our daughters frantically enquiring if we truly love them and why we haven’t yet wished them a Happy New Year. On other occasions, we have been known to spend New Year’s eve in faraway lands like Morocco or Hawaii in the company of locals who feel a deep sense of pity for us. One time, we spent the night in Bahrain in a hotel wondering why anyone would spend a night in a hotel in Bahrain. This year, we will be doing both – traveling to New Zealand to rub shoulders and hobnob with sheep and hobbits and then making a dash back to San Francisco on December 31st to fall asleep on our couches.

Of course, New Year’s Eve is more than just a day of destroying property or setting things on fire. It’s also a day when we must ruminate on our terrible mistakes of the past year and sell those loser stocks and book our losses so we can achieve what is called tax loss harvesting by accountants who have carefully studied such methods for years in universities. Whether we are hurling coffee mugs in Denmark or hoarding lentils in Italy, these traditions all point to one universal human truth: We are somehow terrified of the calendar. We are so desperate whenever the Earth completes one full elliptical round around the sun that we will engage in competitive eating and public luggage-running to appease the gods of fate.

So, this December 31st, pick your ritual wisely. Just remember: if you try to do all of them at once, you’ll be running around the block in polka-dotted underwear, choking on a grape, while someone throws a plate at your head. Something tells me that’s probably not going to do the trick.

This will be my last report for the year. If you’re one of those who depend on the What Ho! report to keep up with current events and news, you might want to consider seeking medical help for your condition or look elsewhere or both. Speaking of needing help with mental health, I’d love to hear from my readers (hey, that’s you!) on your New Year’s Eve memories and traditions and how you managed to avert disasters in the years past.

Have a great weekend. Merry Christmas and a happy, happy New Year to all of y’all.