Most New Year poems stand at the party door with a glass raised. Balachandran V's "New Year Eve," dated Trivandrum, 31 December 2008, looks at the stage set instead. Its central idea is quietly bleak. The turning of the calendar changes nothing about the human condition, and the celebrations around it are a shared make-believe. By the end, though, the poem suggests we may need that make-believe in order to bear things.
The opening line promises a threshold: "Once again, at the gates of another year." Gates suggest something grand, a passage into somewhere new. But "Once again" already sounds like a sigh, and the next line floods the scene with sand: "In this endless desert." The New Year is not a destination but "a façade, / A prop / On the other side of which / The endless desert continues." The metaphor is theatrical, a painted front with nothing built behind it, and the line breaks carry it. "A prop" gets a line to itself, small and dismissive. Then the sentence trails across three short lines before reaching "continues," a word that seems to keep walking after the stanza ends.
The second stanza moves from landscape to behaviour, and the theatre becomes explicit with "play-acting." Every verb is in the future: "We will go through," "We will go on." The speaker already knows next year's script. The list "living, loving, playing and crying" could describe a full human life, but "rituals" has drained it, and these are things we merely "go through." Then comes the poem's most compressed phrase, "Bringing and burying lives." The alliteration welds birth and death into one action, as if both were chores on the same schedule. "Perfunctory" is the sharpest word here. It means done from duty, without care, and the greeting "‘Happy New Year’" sits hemmed in by a dash and quotation marks, held at arm's length like a phrase the speaker is quoting rather than saying. The last two lines, "Feigning interests new / Bidding farewells to old," drop their articles and invert the word order. They sound clipped and mechanical, with novelty and endings ticked off like items on a list.
The final stanza is the shortest, and it turns. "We conjure up illusions of oases" uses a magician's verb, so we are both the conjurers and the audience of our own trick. The pronoun "we" runs through the whole poem, and the speaker never sneers from above. The desert changes too. Before, it merely "continues"; now it "spreads," an active, creeping verb, and it is "all around." Then the poem hedges: "Perhaps we have to, / Lest mirages turn into nightmares." "Perhaps" admits uncertainty, and "Lest" gives the line the formality of a warning label. The poem doesn't explain the nightmare, so this part is open to interpretation. One persuasive reading is that without our self-made oases, the shimmering emptiness would turn frightening. Whatever the exact meaning, the poem ends on the need for illusion, not on the desert. That softens the earlier contempt in "façade" and "prop." Props, after all, are what allow a play to go on.
The form suits this idea. The poem is free verse, with no rhyme and no steady metre, and its lines range from two words to a full sentence. There is no pattern for the speaker to hide behind, which fits a poem about stripping away decoration. The diction is plain and conversational, so the few loaded words, "façade," "perfunctory," "feigning," "conjure," stand out sharply. The repetition of "desert" (three times in a poem of barely twenty lines) works like the landscape itself, with nothing to break the horizon.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal of both easy options. It won't offer the cheer expected of a New Year poem, and it won't settle into despair. Because it is dated the last day of 2008, it reads, judging by the text, like a thought caught inside the ritual rather than looked back on from outside. Anyone who has sent a forwarded "Happy New Year" message while feeling nothing in particular will recognise the moment. The poem's answer is honest and slightly consoling: the oasis may be an illusion, but it is one we build together.