Are you Y2K compliant?

What’s more, according to an informed agency that studies seemingly irrelevant bits ofinformation, the average person laughed for 18 minutes a day during the ’50s, and only for six minutes in the ’90s. At this rate, in another 50 years, laughter as a behavioural reflex would have completely disappeared from the human personality. Scary, right?

To make navigation through such unchartered terrain a bit easier, here’s a Survivor’s Guide to the New Millennium designed exclusively for Indian Express readers.

Are you Y2K compliant?

To make a trauma-free transition to the New Age, it’s important to check if you not just your computer are Y2K compliant. In order to do so, switch to your DOS, or Disk Operating System, located somewhere in the lower brain and type the command `date’. Then enter a new date, 31/12/1999, for the last day of the millennium. Under the DOS command `time’, enter `23.58′ and switch yourself off. After a few minutes, switch yourself on again. Go back to your DOS. Check if the `date’ command shows 01.01.2000.

If it doesn’t, it means that you, as a human entity,are not Y2K compliant and therefore do not qualify to become a New Ager. You will then find yourself somewhere in Time Zone 0, with the onerous responsibility of having to reinvent the wheel. It will take you approximately 5,000 centuries to get back to the Computer Age, but this time you’ll make doubly sure that you remain Y2K compliant.

The M-virus

The millennium virus is a rare and dangerous disease that strikes human civilisation every thousand years. I wasn’t there last time (the bubonic plague would have probably got me if I was), so it’s difficult to conjure up behaviour patterns caused by this noxious malady. Suffice it to say that the typical symptoms of the disease are already manifesting themselves, with every drawing conversation, chat show, newspapers article, peppered with the M-word.

It’s all a question of making millennial hay while the millennial sun shines, which results in millennial yarns garnished as millennial truths being trotted out by the millennial peddlers ofpop-sociology. As millennial clocks strike in millennial monuments, the millennium worshipers in minimalist designer gear will drink millennial champagne and watch the millennial sun go down into a millennial sea and thus capture the sublime millennial moment. If all this strikes you as the biggest farce of the millennium, you are not far wrong. My suggestion is that you steer clear of all the hype. You do your thing and let the earth do its.

Colour theorists and doomsday prophets

These are the faddists of the New Age. The colour of the future, according to the brand futures whizkids at Young and Rubicam, is Blue. The agency polled colleagues in 41 countries about the connection between colours and the millennium and found Blue to be the preferred colour because of its association with the sky, sea and sense of limitlessness. Which is all very nice, but when did you last see a blue sky anyway? So now it seems we’re going to be zapped by blue everywhere you look, from blue icecreams to societyladies sporting pretty blue bouffants to match their turquoise baubles. I find this all quite weird, and am in total agreement with VHP’s Giriraj Kishore that saffron is a far prettier hue. This in fact is an international conspiracy that requires at least one rath yatra.

But the colour theorists are relatively harmless, it’s the doomsday prophets one has to really watch out for if you want to emerge from this millennium with sanity intact. Next time one of them collars you in the market, and suggests that the minute this millennium ends, the sun could fall through the ozone hole into the sea and cause a gigantic tidal wave that could destroy the world, remember that Hollywood has been through all this before and it’s all a harmless pre-millennial fantasy.