THE MANY NEW YEARS OF INDIA

ON the last day of 2025, I found myself at a popular south Indian vegetarian eatery in New Delhi.

- MADHAVAN NARAYANAN

A huge picture of the founder's guru hung on the wall near a lamp and other visuals that symbolised Shaivite devotion. As I waited for my takeaway, a colourful garland of giant balloons arrived to decorate the place. An attendant sporting sacred ash on her forehead told a colleague in Tamil: "Only now it feels like a new year."

The incident happened after a week that saw zealots disrupting Christmas celebrations across India, taunting fellow Hindus for sporting Santa caps. Such disruptions are an exception to the Indian rule of celebrating festivals-looking beyond faith. Multicultural bonhomie is reinforced by joyful social media posts like the clichéd one on Kolkata's Nahoum's bakery: "It is the only place in the world where the Hindus stand in queue to buy Christmas cakes from a Jewish bakery made by a Muslim baker."

But there is more to this than a penchant for festive fervour. There is no such thing as a single new year's day for most Indians. Apart from Hindus, we have Sikhs, Muslims, Jews, Parsis and Buddhists celebrating their own turns of the calendar.

While Christians start their era with what is the most widely accepted birth year of Jesus Christ, the Sikhs have their Nanakshahi calendar honouring Guru Nanak, on which the year starts around March 14. But then, Sikhs also have their harvest-linked Baisakhi around April 14 to mark the solar new year coinciding with the start of the Khalsa order by Guru Gobind Singh in 1699.