We live in such wonderful times! There appears to be an excuse for a party almost every day. And it's been like this for four years now.

The most obvious reason, of course, for all of us is the new calendar Millennium. It doesn't really matter much that some celebrated the beginning of the new era last year, some are doing it this year, and many others on both new years and at every opportunity in between.

After all, every excuse to prolong a party is a perfectly valid one. I remember how my daughter's birthday each year has - fed partly by my "single-parent" guilt and my need to "compensate" - multiplied into six celebrations: one with her class-mates at school, one with her friends at the day-care, one at her grandparents', and so on ..... Nobody has complained to date.

Well, in our household, take 1999 for example. It was a big one indeed, for more reasons than the obvious.

The first one was a personal milestone: that year I completed the 50th year of my life on the planet. Despite oodles of advice, warnings and assurances that I received - solicited and otherwise - from every direction, it was not easy to decide what I wanted to do with that calendric event.

I thought about it a bit. For several months. As I've always done, mostly subconsciously, when I've arrived at such milestones in the past.

In retrospect, I am aware of a pattern of behaviour: I can't remember exactly what I did when I turned 10. But I now realize that I uprooted myself from the land of my birth and upbringing and immigrated to Canada when I passed my second decade. Headed to law school when I turned 30. Fled the metropolis of Toronto, my home for almost two decades, and settled in small-town Guelph, when I turned 40.

So what was this new crossroad going to bring? Anything? I muse at a few odd things I have already done - I now realize - since I turned 50. Set against the backdrop of the fact that I have suffered from vertigo for several years, they are significant:

I went up on a hot-air balloon one hot day. Voluntarily, I might add. Having survived it, I then permitted myself, some weeks later, to be strapped into the spare-seat of ultra-light aircraft and roller-coasted around like a crazed bird.

The very next day, still in disbelief of what I had been through, I surrendered to being hoisted by a para-sail out in the ocean, and dangled high up, a thousand feet in the air, for half-an-hour wondering, albeit calmly: "Why, O why, am I doing this?"

Peter Aykroyd (father of the veteran actor, Dan Ackroyd), who directed much of the spectacular hullabaloo around Canada's Centennial celebrations in 1967, offers an answer. In The Anniversary Compulsion (Dundurn Press, Toronto, 1992), he states that he believes "the observance of anniversaries to be ritual behaviour". A sort of rite of passage to "celebrate or mark certain times of transition."

Individuals do it, in the form of birthdays, wedding anniversaries, New Year's Day, etc. By public celebration through parties, for example, or a private observance - such as my changes in personal direction or the uncharacteristic willingness to be dangled in the stratosphere.

Groups too go through similar rituals. For similar reasons.

Thus, to me as a Sikh, 1999 was as significant as the commencement of the third millenium is to the Christian world. 1999 marked the tercentenary of Vaisakhi, the day that has as much significance to Sikhdom as Easter and Christmas have for Christendom.

That first Vaisakhi Day, as we know it today, proved a monumental milestone for members of the then two-century old religion. Guru Gobind Singh challenged Sikhs - literally, "learners", those who were eager to progress spiritually - to focus their spiritual lives on serving others, the needy and the disadvantaged. The dramatic events of that one, eventful day came to symbolize Death and Resurrection for Sikhs, not unlike Easter does for Christians. Before the day was over, it provided the culminating transformation of an entire society, the process having been started by Nanak in the 15th century and carried on by the nine who carried his torch thereafter.

Of course, the worldwide commemoration of the Tercentenary merely provided a seamless continuation of an ongoing celebration for Sikh-Canadians. They were, at that point, still in the midst of projects begun in 1997 to mark the Centennial of the first Sikh settlement in Canada.

So, if ever an excuse has been necessary to go on the razzle, there has been no dearth since then.

Thus, my personal milestone has only been enhanced by the bigger ones. And, to that rich mix, add the calendric millennium!

The confluence of so many reasons to have fun, the sheer weight of it all is almost too much to bear. Choices, choices, choices. Decisions, decisions, decisions. Like many others, I too faced the unprecedented dilemma: where do I want to be at the exact moment the ball drops in the Times Square and '99 changes to '00, and the following year,'00 to '01?

On the coastal tip of Newfoundland? British Columbia? Standing amidst the Great Pyramids? Listening to the celestial music in the Durbar Sahib of Amritsar? Aboard a ship somewhere in the Seychelles? Atop Mount Sinai? In the shadow of Mount Everest?

The possibilities, stirred by creative travel agents and hoteliers, were endless.

I remember the notorious asht-graha - a certain confluence of the eight planets - that occurred a number of times while I was growing up in India. With many of their rituals tied to the circumambulatory paths of celestial bodies, a number of Hindu mendicants announced the end of the world. The question then was: where did you want to be when the exact moment arrived?

Most decided that the best place would be out in the country, far from buildings and structures. Less enthused by the goings-on in the universe than most of our neighbours, my parents decided to remain in town. So we stayed behind, along with a small fraction of the population, in a ghost town when the ominous day arrived.

And went, I should add, without incident. The week-long experience in a near deserted town, I will never forget, was spectacular. (Thieves and other scoundrels, incidentally, had a heydey.) Not dissimilar to the pleasure of staying behind in Guelph during hot summer-weekends, while the rest of the city flees to cottage-land. Or the unadulterated glee of driving on a wide-highway after warnings of a severe snow-storm have driven everybody indoors.

At the top of my list, after much reflection, on what I would like to do when it is time to switch calendars was: stay at home! I'd had my fill of wild New Year's Eve parties where, generally, you wait endlessly for hours in a rowdy crowd, watch everybody whoop it up for a vacuous crescendo, and then spend hours in finding your way home.

So, I decided to stay at home for the big one! Surrounded by loved ones - carefully chosen family and friends - and in the cosiest place on earth (home!), celebrating the real gifts we've received and the genuine miracles we have witnessed in our lives to date.

Well, that was then.

This year, after the turn of the new century and the new millennium, hasn't been an ant-climax yet: starting with Vaisakhi this year, all the way to the next, we celebrate the formation of the Sarkar Khalsa by Sher-e-Punjab Ranjit Singh two centuries ago. No mean feat, if you remember that a mere century had then passed since Guru Gobind Singh's seminal creation of the Khalsa!

While we revel in the memory of those events, there's more coming around the corner.

Later this month, I celebrate, on a personal level, the 30th anniversary of my family's arrival in Canada. Not as momentous as Columbus' "discovery" of America, our "discovery" of Canada has nevertheless been cause for celebration within our household ever since. And will be this year, thirty-fold.

Then, next year and the year after: more anniversaries of major historic milestones. One marks the Quatercentenary of the first compilation of the Adi Granth, the other the Tercentenary of the investiture of the same as our Eleventh and perpetual Guru.

There you go. There's enough to keep us busy for a while. In celebration. In retrospection. In introspection.

We are so blessed. After all, these landmark anniversaries themselves are no less than gifts. Not just because they bring joy and festivities. What good are anniversaries if they aren't also occasions to stop and think and assess and reassess? To consolidate. To express our gratitude. To hope. To inspire. To dream. To chart. To energize ....

The same principle holds for anniversaries of solemn events. This week marks the 17th year of the most recent ghallughara in Sikh history: the desecration of Harmandir Sahib and umpteen gurdwaras by Indian government troops, and the massacre of tens of thousands of innocent Sikhs in 1984.

Such anniversaries too are gifts, no less than the other ones. We remember our martyrs in our daily Ardaas because we enjoy the fruit of their sacrifice every day. Not dissimilar to the Christian concept of Christ's crucifixion and liberation of all those who follow his path, our martyrs too have successively built the very foundations of our spiritual lives. We owe them so much.