Stand your ground, but mind your manners in the New Year

If receiving impersonal pings has made you weary, I hear you. But soldier on, don't let the overkill of seasonal glitter get to you.

Since you're one of the brave souls who has lifted a newspaper on, dare I say it, the morning of January 1, congratulations on a good habit and yay for the print medium. Let's hope that 2019 - it always takes me a few weeks to get used to writing the newer calendar year - that everything those wretched forwards say it should be.
By now, the painful memory of last night's traffic should have abated. You have officially survived another whole year. Congratulations! Not only have you survived the year, you would have, by now, withstood a fair number of blessings and wishes for prosperity and luck, including spam from yoga studios and SMSAlert from whichever stores you left your details with during your last mall outing.
If receiving impersonal pings has made you weary, I hear you. But soldier on, don't let the overkill of seasonal glitter get to you. It will soon be February. The firecracker and purple party hat emojis will be replaced by roses and hearts. Then don't say you want January 1 to come back, if just for the sheer aesthetic value of less corny Jan GIFs.
January 1 is infamous for all sorts of bunkum. Don't buy it. 'What you do on the first day of the year is what you do for the rest of the year.' Some unwise soul sold me that drivel once and it stuck in my unwise head. Last January 1, I might have had the day off. What did I do? I can't remember. In the evening, I know I wore long earrings and went with friends to dinner at a restaurant in Business Bay. That was hardly a trend for the year. I must have been to Business Bay just under five times since then. I never saw the same gathering of friends again in 2018, not all together anyway. The wisdom of 'what you do on January 1. blah blah' is suspect. Except for the long earrings, which I continue to wear. You see, some things will remain in our hands, whatever else is written in the stars.
Sorry to sound like The Grinch. I'm not really. The yellow earnest smiley is my spirit emoji. I like the idea of resolving to do stuff and sticking to it; it's how people turn vegetarian. One should have ideals to live up to. It's healthy even to set a template for the year. And you know how it goes: talk of resolutions always comes up. Do I have any? Sure. I'll even stick to some. One of them is a reminder, a renewed commitment to not interrupt people. (Hey, all resolutions can't be on the scale of Burj Khalifa fireworks! Got to start small.)
So, don't be like Rani Mukerjee and the gaggle of actresses on Rajeev Masand's recent show where the people he interviewed had no qualms talking over the other, cutting each other off (except Tabu, she's polite). I don't want to do that. If anyone spots such behaviour (the few who read this and know me, i.e.), please pull me up. I also don't think anyone should allow themselves to be spoken to like that. I see this all the time. Let's bring assertiveness back. Self-respect demands that you not be a doormat (or a dormouse) if someone talks to you without respect. It's not a senior-junior thing. It's a human thing. It's 2019. Let's not shout or be petty or engage so much in gossip. Higher ideals, people! Keep up.
My last confrontation with boorishness was earlier in the week. I was about to alight from the train at the Noor Bank station. The train had halted but the doors hadn't yet opened. Even through the glass in those few seconds, I could see a familiar off-putting tendency. Passengers were positioned bang in front of the doors. Their bodies were angled with intent to charge in. As the doors opened, one woman attempted to get in before allowing the ones getting off a chance.
"Wait! First you have to let people get off," I said brusquely. I didn't expect another disembarking woman on my left to agree with me. And this fellow disembarker was less interested in being polite. Woman getting on heard me, looked shocked, and said, "Seriously?". This irritated me. I thought, what the hell. Fellow disembarker and I happened to emphatically say 'Yes, seriously!' at the same time. No, a cat fight did not ensue. Ours was just a chorus of tired calling out of boorish behaviour. The woman boarding the train was out-voiced two to one. She said, "Alright, alright, sorry, but you can say so nicely!". She had a point. If everyone's manners were less exhausting, people would have better blood pressure readings. My point is, let's have less of this. It's so easy to be courteous. So, why fail?
To health, self-improvement, better manners, and more love. Happy 2019. As they say, have a good one. Say thank you?
-nivriti@khaleejtimes.com