New Year in Navi Mumbai

The past few years have not exactly been the best for me personally. Both the 2013 and 2014’s New Years’s eve have been so unremarkable that I can’t really remember the details of what we did those nights.

Navi Mumbai, Bombay’s little brother and the “Smart City”, has lately been big on Celebrations within the confines of the housing societies. Neighbours celebrating big celebrations together was not the case until a few years ago, especially not in a place like this. Our small housing complex had no such celebration. Instead, my mother and I went to a quaint eatery opposite the local train station which has been virtually unchanged since she first visited it her post-college days, Navi Mumbai being nothing but swathes of empty grassland then.

At 11:30 pm, we visited our cousins and maternal grandparents, who recently moved from Nagpur to next door to our cousins. In contrast, this significantly bigger complex had piercing music playing downstairs with some food stalls and around a 100 people mulling downstairs, divided between kids standing up and adults on plastic chairs. I quickly retired to my grandparents house after a touch and go with my cousins ( both sisters ). It was my mother, her parents and my sister when the clock beeped twelve.

There was no big realization at the end of that day nor was there a particular sense of accomplishment or even disappointment. It was just ‘nice’. There was nothing else to it. How was yours?