‘What did you do for New Year’s Eve?” That’s the standard question right through the first week of every new year. The unstated assumption is that everyone does something on December 31 night. Yet I know many people who go to sleep at their usual time of 10 pm. For them 31/12 is just another set of numbers. There are others who watch television. They do that every evening, but on that last day, they sit up beyond midnight as a special case.

What did I do? I did what I said last year I wouldn’t do. Which is what I said the year before. Which is what I said the previous year…That was to go to my club, Bombay Gymkhana, and join its large party-on-the-lawn with a group of friends. Ironically, at this party you meet people after people who say the same thing in different ways: ‘This is my last year’. Or, ‘Next year I’ll do something different.’ Or, ‘Why do we land up here year after year?’ The answer to that rhetorical question is simple. The Gym puts on a splendidly organised party and it’s hassle-free. All you do is book your ticket, pay the fee and turn up. Try and organise that yourself and at midnight, the last thing you will want to say is ‘Happy New Year’.

For a couple of years, I did have a New Year’s ‘bash’ at home. When the evening was over and I tried to remember what I had done all evening, the sudden realisation dawned on me that I had done nothing. Except stand at the front door to greet incoming guests and to see off departing guests. Since people party hop on that day, the average time anyone spends at a party is 45 minutes. So the comings and goings are endless, and as the host you finally decide that it makes sense to park yourself at the Point of Arrival and the Point of Departure, that is, the front door.

Incidentally, people dump their unwanted bottles on you that day. Usually it’s Indian champagne, the one with the name of someone of the French aristocracy. One socialite brought 12 bottles of wine as a gift many years ago, which seemed extravagantly generous till you saw that the wine was from one of India’s first wineries. This winery produced memorable wine: once you tasted it, you made it a point to remember you would never have it again. The saving grace was that it was incredibly cheap, so if your taste buds had been sand papered over, it was an inexpensive way to get high. I don’t know what I did with those bottles. I wasn’t going to drink the wine. I couldn’t possibly offer it to my guests nor could I gift the bottles to my friends. I probably gave them to would-be chefs saying, ‘Here’s some wine to cook with.’

Having given up on self-organised parties, a group of us got together one year and decided to have a boat party. A small boat, illuminated for the evening, great music, good food, the cool air over the Arabian Sea…It sounds delicious. It wasn’t. A boat party offers no escape, so not everyone wanted to come (definitely not party hoppers). But a boat needs to be filled to reduce per head costs. So remote friends and good acquaintances were roped in. At the end of five hours you realised — mutually, no doubt — why they were remote friends and good acquaintances.

Another year we tried Goa, the place Mumbai flocks to at any excuse. However, since New Year’s is everyone’s excuse, you fly to Goa and pay through your nose to find that you have come to Mumbai. Or geographically correctly, Mumbai in Goa. Same folks, different clothes. The other people who were there were NRIs who wore bikinis with their gold jewellery, neither of which got wet. If that wasn’t enough, you soon found out that Mumbai had moved to Goa in another way: it had taken its traffic there. We spent most of New Year’s Eve stuck in our cars on roads that were so narrow you couldn’t do a U-turn.

So, what about next year? One last time, the Bombay Gym?