WHAT could we call the miss of the millennium? Why, the poor millennium itself. Nobody seems to find the dawn of the new millennium, or the passage of the last, an occasion significant enough to celebrate. What, we have done that already? No, we haven’t.

Yes, we did celebrate last year, but it was anything but a New Millennium’s Eve. It was simply a grand New Year’s Eve celebration, or at the most we may call it the "00" celebration. For that’s what all the special significance of that day was.

The new millennium did not dawn on January 1, 2000. However, it shall on January 1, 2001. Well, you see, everything does not happen as it should. It would have been so nice if mathematics could see the logic that 2000 sounds nice for a new millennium. Unfortunately, it does not.

Simply put, we would all agree that the first year of the Christian calendar finished on December 31, 0001, and, likewise, the second year ended on December 31, 0002. By this logic, the 2000th year will end on December 31, 2000. Now, we all know that a millennium is 1,000 years. So two millenniums should be 2,000 years. To say that a new millennium will begin only when the previous one ends will be a truism. So, the end of the second millennium, which means the end of 2,000 years, has to be on December 31, 2000, and the dawn of the third millennium on January 1, 2001.

Simple? But then why didn’t we see it last year. Maybe it was the modern pace of life, we wanted time to move faster than it does (now, bringing in Einstein and his theory on time and space here would perhaps be a little too much). Or maybe we couldn’t wait getting drunk and living it up; after all, there are not many such millennial occasions in a lifetime. Perhaps it was just that we didn’t give a damn to pedantic wretches like me who just can’t get into the spirit and have to complain about others being happy. All said and done, the partying was great, the "00" sounded new enough, the Y2K bug was to strike on that day, so why complain?

Moreover, not only were common mortals celebrating, all media, BBC and Time included, was celebrating and vying with each other to come out with "millennium specials." An e-missive last year to the BBC, asking why it was celebrating with millennium pages on its Web site, evoked a rather curious response: it said it knew it was not the new millennium, but as the British people seemed to be in the mood to celebrate, it decided to join the party. However, the response promised the BBC would also mark the occasion when it was actually the time to celebrate! So the media is not all that misleading after all.

Now, all you party animals, don’t lose heart just because you were misled into celebrating an occasion that wasn’t. All this was done just so you could do it all over again. Happy jiving!