Farewell 2016.

“An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.”

~ Bill Vaughan

Being a pesoptimist, I would be going to bed at my usual time and waking up in the new year also at the usual time. There will be no change to my daily routine as, for me, being in blissful retirement, every eve is a new year’s eve and every day is a new year’s day.

It however is always an interesting exercise to review the year that has gone by as many of my friends do by mail or blog posts but something that I have so far not done. Let me try for the first time this year.

The year started off well though I suffered from a prolonged chest infection carried over from the previous year. I was under medication for over four months during the tail end of which, I went to Chennai to be with my family and friends for some time while a kitchen and living area renovation took place at home in Pune.

While at Chennai, I got to know first hand the problems that many of my relatives and friends had faced during the floods. While there, I also made an overnight trip to Hosur to meet a cousin who I had not seen since our school days.

When I returned to Pune, the work at home was still in progress and I stayed in a hotel near our home for five nights. Hotel stay in Pune after 26 years!

Come April, I was diagnosed with a medical problem which lasted well into September before leaving me for good. During that period, I mostly wrote just the weekly LBC blog posts and skipped the others. During the same period, my cousin from Vashi and his wife as well as my sister from Chennai visited Pune to check up and cheer me on my way to recovery. I was able to find a remarkable specialist doctor who treated me and got me completely back to normal in a most friendly yet professional way.

We also had Debora and Phil from the USA and after a long time, my nephew Jaisundar, visiting us as well as many local friends who dropped in regularly.

Thanks to the increasing penetration of social media, fourteen old colleagues reestablished contact with me and are in regular touch through facebook, whatsapp, phone calls and email. I will be meeting some of them personally early in the new year. I may get back in touch with some more in the new year too.

I attended a great get together at Lonavala with some of my old colleagues during the monsoon. I also attended a small lunch meeting with my classmates. I had blogged about both occasions here. I went to Navi Mumbai on two occasions, once to spend some time at Vashi and the other last Saturday about which I blogged earlier this week.

The day before my trip to Navi Mumbai, I attended a lunch get-together with some of my fellow alumni of the Business School that I had gone to. About six weeks ago, I had attended another such a meeting, a more formal one to meet with the Institute’s Director, Alumni Affairs.

During the year there were two deaths in the family. The first one was that of my daughter in love’s father, Vishnu, an untimely death if there ever was one. The other was that of my aunt, the youngest sibling of my late father and the last of the previous generation from my generation of siblings and cousins. When I remarked about this, my brother who had rung me up to inform me about the death, remarked that we are now the “previous generation”!

As I write this, it has been the coldest December that I have experienced in Pune during the last 26 years. I hope that we will have the usual pleasant winter that we always had next year.

All in all, somewhat an eventful year and I now look forward to 2017 with interest.

The topic for this last week of the year LBC Friday post was suggested by me. I doubt that Shackman will be posting this week as he seems to be still under the weather. Pravin should but perhaps later than Friday which for him is a working day!