What a wasted day this has been! Stuck in an airport lounge on a Sunday.

My colleague and I caught the 11.30AM flight from Guwahati for Calcutta, for which we had to leave the hotel at 9.00AM, which obviously gave me just enough time to wake up, have a quick breakfast and bath and get ready and packed. The connection to Mumbai from Calcutta is at 6.00PM. I have enough work to last me through the hours, but that's not the point. Sunday is the one day of relaxation that I get, a day to be spent with family and friends, free from patients and other medical worries and here I am wasting my time on two flights and airport lounges. Thank God for small mercies though; I have the notebook, I have a power socket around me and I can get this piece ready well in time for Nancy and Tony. Though Nancy will kill me, for sure.

We reached Guwahati on Friday morning for a conference. Guwahati is the capital of Assam, a state in the northeastern part of the country. This region, the North-East consists of seven states, which together are called the seven sisters. For many years now, peace has eluded this region due to constant insurgency and strife, related to issues of group and tribal identity and economics. Even though these issues have not been sorted out fully, over the last year or so, relative peace has returned to this region and at least the major metros are seeing some kind of an economic boom. The years of trouble have however taken their toll in an area, which has so much natural beauty, that the entire region would have been able to subsist on tourism alone. Hills, rivers, national forests - you name it, they have it. And the entire North-East still isn't as populated as the rest of the country - a state like Arunachal Pradesh, which is the size of Maharashtra or Florida has a population of only 800,000.

This was my second visit to Guwahati. We went to Assam for the first time in January 1996; my wife and I travelled to Kaziranga, a rhinoceros and tiger sanctuary and to the Nameri river, which is excellent for angling and boating. We fell in love with the region and promised ourselves that we would return someday in the near future; as promises go, a tall one, considering how difficult it is to get time out and how a new place previously not traveled to, always holds more attraction. But conferences are a good way to make short trips and I am sure we will be visiting this part of the country more often in the future. Guwahati itself is a pretty town, on the banks of the river Brahmaputra.

The people of this region are soft-spoken, inherently polite and nice, but as is true of most small towns in India, lazy, laid-back and perpetually late. Most of the people have partly Mongoloid features such as high cheekbones and the characteristic slant of the eyes, due to the intermixing between the Mongoloid and Indo-Aryan races over the centuries.

Yesterday, a friend of mine living in Guwahati took us to a show at a local club. It was a fashion show followed by a performance by the "Ricky Martin of Calcutta". Our hosts and their friends would anxiously keep asking us our opinions regarding the models, choreographers and the "Ricky Martin" clone, wanting reassurance that even in Guwahati, these shows were of acceptable standard; as if being from Mumbai, the cultural capital on India, made us experts on fashion shows, music shows and what is hip and hop. I haven't been to a fashion show in years and in any case now with the 24-hour French channel Fashion TV, beaming the latest fashions (and models) into our homes, even the slightest inclination to go to one dies a quick death. The last nightclub I went to was a year ago; a sure sign of aging when you think that loud music and smoke are irritating and when you feel that hitting the bed before midnight and an eight-hour sleep are more important than being "with-it'. Of course, not wanting to letdown my hosts, we kept playing our expected roles, making pithy comments about the shows, criticizing and praising where necessary and comparing the performances with similar shows in Mumbai.

As is usual with such shows, Guwahati's brightest and best were on display. Black was the color of the day and anything more than knee-length seemed horribly out of place, unless of course the sari was slinky. All the teenage girls looked underage and skinny, all their mothers looked less than 30 and all the teenage boys looked like VJs. Only the fathers looked their ages, paunches et al. I guess with Yukta Mookhey winning the Miss World title in London (the third Indian Miss World since 1995), every teenage girl wants to be one. Nothing wrong with that I guess, except when the Miss World, all of 21 years old, gets on stage and starts spouting homilies on how to live life correctly and how to improve the world, all you want to do is to tell her to shut up. And something is obviously terribly wrong, when beauty contests are the only international events that we seem to do well in.

Endnote: I met a Canadian engineer working in New York who has an Assamese wife in Guwahati. He has been coming to Guwahati every year for the last five years because his wife still hasn't managed to get a visa to join him. He is going to spend the Millenium (sorry Mike) eve in Guwahati and was serious about the fact that he wouldn't have to worry about Y2K problems, which may crop up in the US. Which led me to narrate this one to him: "Why are most Indian banks fully Y2K compatible?" "Because the majority are still not computerized."

I'm going to do something different for my offering this time, but something that must be done. I'm going to give voice to the obligatory complaint of all writers: I don't know! I don't know what-to-say, what-I'm-doing, why-I'm-here ... what it's all about. I'm no huge authority on anything except my own narrow perspective of my few years here on our lovely, commodious planet.

I feel like such a fraud. Having a forum. Having a platform. Having a voice. But ... now that I've gotten that out of the way -- my real enthusiasms for being a writer always come roaring back. I was born to talk. I know that now. I also know that I am lucky indeed to be able to share the results of my journey through these waning days of the century with you. We can compare notes, exchange curiosities. If one of us lacks the proper currency, we can always barter whatever we do have: I can tell you what I've learned, so far, in my 52 years of study. You can tell me a little more about your neighborhood on the other side of the world.

I write a daily journal column elsewhere on the web. Did I say daily? I must have been crazy when I committed to it. It's true that it was nearly a half-year ago to the day -- June 21, the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, and a day in which I must have thought I had all the time in the world. Do a little writing every day -- how hard could that be?

I've never been capable, before this unique moment in time, to do anything -- and I mean anything -- on a daily basis. When I was raising my children the Dr. Spock way, his one ironclad rule was: Be Consistent. Geeze Louise, but I was doomed before I even began. Consistency doesn't come easily to women, Italian women, American baby-boomer women, all women: La Dona is mobile, remember?

Consistency also raises expectations, which in turn lead to those dratted traditions. We are, as I write this, in the hectic middle of the most onerous, rule-bound time of the year for many women. You really should: be baking, be shopping, be making, be sweeping, be mopping, be wrapping, be stuffing, be swagging, be staggering, be dropping like a stone beneath the wave after tidal wave of seasonal wants and demands. We're not waving over here, folks; we're drowning. Oh, and lest I forget: be of good cheer.

Last night I wrote my daily column about a bit of Christmas hoo-ha that I'd made with my own two hands lo! these many years ago. Thirty-three years ago, to be exact. And for every year thereafter, come what may, I would take out my little homemade manger scene and spread it out on a desktop, a counter, a bureau, a table ... in the middle of the model train set, away from the cats, next to the menorah. You could say that I was being consistent, or that I was creating a tradition.

But not really -- what I was really doing was harboring a grudge. I really big, Grinchy chip on my shoulder. My own personal Yule Log.

And believe me, this is a hard thing to talk about in December, rather than January. You just watch -- no matter what happens to the computers as the clocks and calendars spin their numbers, no matter what upset we suffer or dodge, come January the remorse will set in. You will have eaten too much and spent too much and wanted too much and there will be so little to show for it. A few sprinkles and baubles and tarnished tinsel in the cold January light. January is the time for the strong and the newly sober to put away the playthings and get back to the serious work of making some money to pay for all that Christmas excess.

But, we're not there yet. We're still in the avoidance/denial phase of the solar cycle. December is the time for the merry gerbil dance of the insanely optimistic, the time for the lunatic sparkly fringe to shine. And that would be me, of course. I believe in miracles. Always have, always will. I was born and baptized and confirmed in this religion of hope; it therefore behooves me to lie and cover up and muffle my fears and over-decorate and overcompensate at this special time of year.

And the manger scene I made looks so innocent and pretty. Who could know what I know? You see, when I was constructing it I was doing so from the first real debris of my otherwise lovely life. I'd hit my first wall -- the first of many I might add -- the first huge obstruction that told me I wasn't necessarily going to be a big success in life, or a shoe-in for a grand prize, or even a reasonably happy person. I had, in fact, just realized that I might have made a couple of really, really big life-changing mistakes.

Oh well. Kid's got to hit the wall sometime, right? Nobody flies up and up on wax wings forever. The details aren't really important; we all make mistakes. Some are whoppers and some are merely repetitive drudgery. We all make them, but when you're very young you actually think you're not supposed to. As if you had a choice. As if you're supposed to constantly make choices, and every single choice is supposed to be a good one. A wise one. How hopeless is that?

So, in this, my last column before Christmas, I would like to give you a gift. It's not exactly a gift of hope, but rather a gift of raised expectations. The wall I'm trying to so gingerly describe without hurting anyone's feelings is a metaphor for realizing that you are mortal. A big 'ole failure. A screw-up, a loser, an anathema, a blight. A bum, a pariah, a ne'er do well and a flop. Yup. That's what you are. That's what we all are.

Even those of us you insist on calling successful. We've screwed up and hit that wall again and again and you know what? Humans were made for this. The wall is not. Humans bounce back, and bounce back again, and each time the spirit gets a little stronger. The wall does not. The wall develops chinks where our hard head has hit it. Through those chinks we start to see a little light. Hit it again: another chink, another insight.

Pretty interesting, right? The more you fail, the more you learn the language of success. The more you fall, the more practice you have in getting up. The more you hit the wall, the greater your chance at pinging against the one sweet spot that is the key to the puzzle, the big mystery that you always have to figure out for yourself.

But, here at this special place called World Year, in the true spirit of Christmas, I will let you in on the secret. I will give you a little present. You ready? Eyes closed, hand out?

There is no wall.

Happy Holidays, everyone!