Happy New Year

It’s that time of year when everyone looks back, compiles best-of lists and gets

M.F. Husain.

thoroughly wrapped up in nostalgia. It is, according to some, the easiest time of the year. “The last week of December is a blessing,” said a journalist friend. “I don’t need to think of pegs or topics. I just have to make a list.” The Italian author Umberto Eco described the act of listing as the origin of culture and lists in general as cultural achievements. If he’s right, then I’m a cultural underachiever because I can’t draw up lists. At best, I can play word association games.

For years, around the last week of December, I’ve resolved to make notes, keep a diary, blog regularly, take photos—essentially, inundate myself with reminders and pointers so that when I sit down to write in late December, I will not channel my inner Homer Simpson and come up only with “D’oh?” So far, nothing has worked. I’ve kept notebooks and lost them. I’ve written blog posts and then shut the window before actually posting. Most of the photographs of random details look just absurd now since I can’t remember why I thought they were significant at the time I clicked them. Basically, all roads seem to lead to “D’oh”.

This year has been a little different, not because my memory has improved but because 2011 was particularly turbulent and unsettling. It’s been a year of deaths, both in India and abroad. Music lost legends in India: Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, Ustad Sultan Khan, Bhupen Hazarika, Jagjit Singh. Some of India’s most charming men, like Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi, Jehangir Sabavala, Mario Miranda and M.F. Husain, left us.

Politically speaking, 2011 was as eventful as a paperback thriller. Movements, revolutions and events erupted, seemingly out of the blue. The Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, Anna Hazare, the death of Osama bin Laden, the bloody head of Muammar Gaddafi, the girl wearing a blue bra in Cairo, the earthquake and tsunami in Japan…if anything, I think 2011 will prove to be a difficult year to forget.

Mumbai may not have been the site of revolutions, but we’ve had our share of dramatic events. There were bomb blasts, murders of young boys and weathered scribes, a fire raged in Bandra, and the streets of the city became distinctly unsafe. Across the world, too much has been ravaged, too much fell apart in 2011, and nothing has been repaired.

Yet, as I write this in that shadowy limbo between last year and a new year, there’s one image that comes to mind. It’s a photograph by Yasuyoshi Chiba, taken in April 2011. It shows an area in Natori, Japan, a little more than a month after the earthquake and tsunami devastated the city. Chiba’s photograph shows a pale yellow sky and a mound of mangled metal. Emerging from this terrible pile is a tree, its branches crowded with delicate cherry blossoms. It’s a truly ethereal image. The flowers are unearthly in their beauty. There’s a stillness to the empty, devastated Natori landscape that makes Chiba’s photograph look like a work of art that has been carefully staged to embody the hope that destruction doesn’t mean it’s the end.

For me, Chiba’s photograph is special precisely because it wasn’t staged. It gives me hope that you don’t have to fabricate everything and might is not the last word; that beauty can grow despite and out of wreckage and grief. We just have to find it and recognise it, like Chiba did when he saw the cherry blossom and took the photograph in a way that would show the detritus of a disaster but focus on the tree that not only survived but even flowered.

I look at Chiba’s photograph and I see a triumph of the human imagination. It gives me hope that the chaos of 2011 may yet yield something other than the disillusionment and violence that has characterised this past year. So, even though it was taken in 2011, Chiba’s photograph is my image for 2012. We’ve already accumulated the dark, haunted, messy parts of the picture. I hope in 2012, we’ll be able to spot the blossoms. I hope we’ll have the equivalent of Chiba’s vision and imagination so that we can actually appreciate the beauty of those blossoms. And, eleven and a half months later, I hope I don’t find myself wondering whether Chiba took this photograph in 2011 or 2012 and going, “D’oh.”

By the time this column is out, it will be well past New Year’s Eve, but I figure this bears repeating for the first week. Happy new year, everyone. Let’s try and make it a good one.

Deepanjana Pal is a journalist and the author of The Painter: A Life of Ravi Varma. She is currently a consulting copy editor at Elle magazine.