The year that should be: 23 predictions for 2023

With 2023 set to be the Year of the Rabbit (decided jointly by the moon and the Chinese Communist Party), most nations are revisiting Aesop’s fables in a bid to be the tortoise. As a result, several things have slowed down even more than before — China’s bureaucracy, India’s economy, French speech, Italian meals and Joe Biden’s brain. The UK, though, has been an exception. Undaunted by centuries of hopping into places where it does not belong, the world’s oldest chumocracy is scampering back to the European Union, scared that there are too few whites left in Westminster to confidently explain their mistakes.

Meanwhile, a predictive survey by You Trust Us Over Your Parents (YTUOUP) shows 2023’s most likely trends for Internet users in India — more PDFs attached than emotions, more DMs blocked than replied to (only for women), more DMs opened than followers (only for men), more activity on Google Pay than Bumble, and more items added to cart than friends added to life.

Elsewhere, public wish lists for the new year across India have been aggregated to reveal the three things an average middle-class Indian wants the most in 2023 — to leave India for the US, to leave India for Canada and to leave India for Australia.

Wondering what the whole of 2023 holds in store while you decide which of your New Year’s resolutions to break first? Here’s presenting 23 predictions for the year that should be.

January

• Pathaan soars at the box office to become the highest grossing Bollywood film of all time, as trolls cannot decide whether to boycott Deepika Padukone for her lack of sanskaar, Shah Rukh Khan for his lack of sentimentality or the plot for its lack of sense.
• With a harsh winter making outdoor gatherings difficult, hundreds of teenagers across Europe and North America come out as “algosexual”, a type of sexual orientation where one is attracted to algorithms, not people.

February

• The final of Super Bowl LVII is played on either side of a Rihanna concert at Arizona’s State Farm Stadium, where the NFL champions are awarded front-row tickets to Rihanna’s next performance.
• Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta acquires Binance, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, and names it MetaMoney, “an attention economy where you pay not in dollars or pounds, but in seconds and minutes”. At its launch, close to 1 million people earn more than 100 time tokens (MetaMoney’s currency) by watching Zuckerberg have breakfast in Augmented Reality.

March

• Pakistan and Bangladesh decide to save a lot of funds, and even more time, by cancelling their parliamentary elections scheduled for 2023, since everyone already knows the winner in both cases. The Election Commission of India takes notes.
• To mark its centenary, TIME magazine unveils a special Person of the Century award, shared posthumously by Adolf Hitler and Steve Jobs, for “mainstreaming the two most recognisable symbols of the last 100 years”.

April

• The fourth season of HBO’s Succession premieres to a lukewarm response, as viewers complain about Logan Roy (played by Brian Cox) using the F-word just six times across the entire season.
• Elon Musk, still waiting to be the richest man on Mars, bans all Twitter accounts that “do not meaningfully contribute to my public sphere by retweeting my personally curated memes”.

May

• At his coronation, King Charles stuns the world by abdicating the throne, sending Prince Andrew to lifetime banishment (in Belfast) and suing Prince Harry and Meghan Markle for hypocrisy, before retiring with Queen Consort Camilla to The Bahamas. Overzealous Indian WhatsApp groups anoint Rishi Sunak as the new King of the United Kingdom.
• Recep Tayyip Erdogan is re-elected to power in Turkey after secretly assuring the Muslim elite of converting major Turkish churches into mosques and covertly guaranteeing the Christian elite of transforming major Turkish mosques into churches.

June

• Inspired by his Bharat Jodo yatra as well as the results of the Assembly elections in Karnataka, Rahul Gandhi announces his transition from part-time politician to full-time walker. In the process, the youngest 53-year-old in India goes from being the face of Congress to being the face of ASICS.
• After six months of exchanging places as Asia’s wealthiest person, Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani crash the Economic Times servers by combining their assets to launch India Inc. (the Is in India are silent). Headquartered at 7, Lok Kalyan Marg in Delhi, India Inc. promises to make all Indian adults employable and Nirmala Sitharaman redundant.

July

• Following the release of Oppenheimer, which details the creation of the atomic bomb, film critics around the world obsess over the intricacy, impact and ingenuity of Cillian Murphy’s jawline.
• FIFA stops sharing attendance records at the 2023 Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand after initial data shows average attendance to be significantly higher than that at the previous men’s edition in Qatar.

August

• The New York Times forces Russia and Ukraine to settle for peace after resolving to stop writing about whichever country’s leader eventually loses the war.
• Taiwan invades itself after getting tired of waiting for the Chinese. The US Pentagon vows to liberate “the innocent Taiwanese from their treacherous compatriots”, leading to Afghan and Iraqi soldiers rolling in their graves.

September

• Lionel Messi converts his record-extending eighth Ballon d’Or into an NFT, before sharing its ownership with club teammates Neymar and Kylian Mbappe. Cristiano Ronaldo goes one better by making an NFT of his own self, before sharing its ownership with his Portugal colleagues.
• Novak Djokovic injects himself with a new Covid vaccine called Djovax, designed by his good friend and energetic medicine specialist, Igor Cetojevic, before being allowed to play in the US Open. He proceeds to lose in the final to Carlos Alcaraz, as no vaccine provides immunity against Alcaraz’s forehand.

October

• Donald Trump is beaten by Ron DeSantis to the Republican presidential nomination for 2024 for not being hard enough on Critical Race Theory (CRT), Saudi Arabia and Pride flags. Trump is also hampered by working women in the US finding DeSantis more despicable.
• Three years after his arrest, Umar Khalid is released from prison after Tihar Jail runs out of paper for him to write on.

November

• The ICC Men’s World Cup final in Ahmedabad’s Narendra Modi Stadium between Pakistan and Australia gets abandoned after the ground staff (hired by the BCCI) threatens a “surgical strike” at the prospect of a Pakistani victory. With no cricket played in the final, Australia win by virtue of most post-match interviews completed throughout the tournament.

December

• Kiara Advani and Sidharth Malhotra’s wedding gets pushed to 2024 as head pandit and lead dancer, Karan Johar, cannot catch a break from reading his own mentions on Instagram.
• The Pointless Accolades Association (TPAA) names Kolkata as the “Cafe Capital of the World”, even as cafe owners in the city feel certain to run out of money before their customers run out of gossip.