NEW! Don’t we just love it? All things new. NEW never goes out fashion, new clothes, new relationships, new jobs, new phone, new car, new house, new eating places, new places to visit, new songs, newborns, new seasons of favorite shows, new networking sites (is it just me?), new experiences, new technology, new breakthroughs, new years and of course New York! We are all about the NEW. Exceptions - wine, sneakers and friends.

Since when do you think humans have been predisposed to a desire for novelty? I would say from the time Eve wanted to try that NEW fruit!

If you put my life on the Y-Axis and the level of happiness on the X-Axis, you’ll see these spikes and surely they will represent something new I did, acquired, saw, etc…

What’s more they even have a term to describe this disorder (an economically essential one?) – Neophilia. Neophiliacs are people who love everything new or novel. Researchers in Japan have found an enzyme correlated with novelty-seeking tendencies. This new enzyme (monoamine oxidase A blah blah) would explain the rise and the rise of consumerism in this modern era, where external influences help us in the creation on our wants and needs aka advertising.

My personal need (Note: not obsession!) with all things new and has been fueled, flamed, oxidized, burnt by the fact that I participate in Singapore living. Things change every day, each day (except for the weather). I have met many a disoriented soul here, confused because nothing is the same as last week, or the month before or the year before. Not to mention how you get seduced by the shopping system (yes, it is a system!). As Uuncyclopedia.com rightly puts it – Singapore is the only shopping mall with a seat in the United Nations (can’t get over this one!)

According to Colin Campbell, a professor of sociology at the University of York in the UK, “If people were to lose interest in the novel, our economy would crash immediately. We have developed a civilization that is dependent on it. That’s the situation we are in, for good or ill.” We don’t want that to happen now, do we? So get on with it people - your pursuit of novelty.

Pursuit of Novelty - Maybe that can be the name of my new theory. Will develop it more later...

Three life-altering things happened in the last few months of 2005, of which I have the liberty (ceteris-paribus) of altering two (the third, I would never want to!) - I changed my marital status, changed my residential status and changed my job status - in that order.

I see myself then and I see myself now and I am a very different person, if not completely. Since all three happened within a short span of each other, I am having extreme difficulty in compartmentalizing and attributing the changes to each of the three. So I plan to apply the process of formulating general concepts by abstracting common properties of instances, to figure out what in me changed to what external coercions.

Before I move, let me warn the curious reader that he/she will not be able to fully understand the 'changes' that I am taking about, not because on my explanatory abilities (or lack of them), but because there is no determinable or distinguishable way these can be described. For a while I heard friends back in India say, I've 'changed', but always thought don't we all, sometime or the other?

Only very recently, I started feeling it, from within, and yet I can't describe it. My countenance is the same, I radiate the same individuality, the same temperament, the same demeanor - I know I can work as hard as I could before, or veg out as shamelessly. Then what is it? Or more importantly, is it for the better or worse. Now, the answer to that is for my benefit only..

More on my abstraction process late...