Happy Birthday

they said… "Hypocrites", I say…

Well how can one be happy when his butt is stinging and he cannot sit anywhere, with loads of yolk running over his hair (I have heard of egg in shampoo, but this is not to my liking) and cold water running along your back…

Yes… my birthday was on the 27th of this month… well actually it should have been 26th, but due to our highly efficient data recording services, my birthday was decided by the government of India as the 27th. (But my governing planets and lucky numbers and gemstones are those of 26th and that is another sob story.) Has that changed the world’s perception about me… I am not a great soul for whom the stars shone down on the birth night… nor was I born with some number tattooed on my head… I was not a Siamese twin… I was not one of the bi-quadruplets of genetic multiples… I was not born during a tsunami or a flood or under any major natural disaster and survived it… nor was I born under some great time of the economic boom and prosperity… I was a simple normal usual healthy child. So what is the point of celebrating my birthday or rather what is wrong with not celebrating my birthday?

I have outgrown my fascination for cutting cakes and having parties ever since I was 5 and learnt that I could say no without getting punished. What exactly is the point of paying some 200 bucks for a pineapple cake that was just eaten in those days and today just smeared around… cannot people just go about and buy a slice of cake whenever they wanted it? They would just spend a fraction of the money they spent for that worthless present… Or littering the house with all that confetti and burst balloons… that is something I felt sorry for the person who usually cleaned up – usually my mom… and since it was my mom, I was obliged to indulge in the hard work too…

What is so great about remembering birthdays… it only represents ominous hypocrisy to me… it reminds you that you are one year older and one step closer to the end of your life… it reminds you of those kiddish joys that you enjoyed doing which you have to now stop doing because you have “mentally matured”… you are supposed to shoulder some responsibility, something that people would never trust you with when you ask to be trusted… it brings an empty hollow wish from some people who never even acknowledge your presence on most days… it puts your best friends at a discomfort for they have to behave differently during those few minutes in which you gain the importance – a glaring difference from being taken for granted to being treated special… it puts you at a major discomfort when asked for a treat and you think of the shock your dad is going to have when he sees your credit card bill… so what is good about birthdays…

Let alone my birthday… what is wrong with forgetting other’s birthdays… every year I forget some birthdays, and some I do remember… it is not that I cannot recall my mom’s date of birth… it is just that on that particular day I forget to wish her… does that mean that I love my mom less… or does it mean that all the love I show for her is a lie all because I forgot to wish her on the birthday? I have forgotten the birthdays of some of my closest friends… I have lots of friends, who are really great friends, but forgot my birthday… now are they my enemies? And those friends who kicked me after that treat – well with friends like these who needs enemies?

Should anyone remember my birthday? I ask why? I am not a great freedom fighter nor have I done some great deed during some big disaster… I don’t want that kind of fame either and most of the birthdays that are remembered are for exaggerated deeds – October2, September5… no one remembers small accomplishments (I don’t think we celebrate Narayanmurthy’s or Azim Premji’s or Lakshmi Mittal’s birthdays on a national scale).

So how do I like my birthday being celebrated? During my engineering college I was thankful that I was born on this day as it usually fell during the vacations… there was no mercy shown… and the more popular you were the greater was the “attention” "showered" on you… somehow after managing to escape the wham-bam logic in engineering I landed up in a great big company that claimed that it loved its employees… what they actually had done was gotten the receptionist’s mail id configured to some cheap birthday reminder service and allocated a budget for some pineapple cake… so every day there would be some pineapple cake for the cafeteria guys to clean up and the rest of the year that employee would be treated like horse shit (not cow shit as that is sometimes considered useful)… after all this ways of celebrated birthdays, I just want the anonymity of 364 days to remain on this particular day too (as it is too much to ask for the same attention for all 365 - too much pineapple cake)…

Last year nature was kind to me, though I am sorry for all those it has been unkind to… People were so preoccupied that they were able to forget poor lucky me… But during this year it was not to be… nature forgot her deadline and even though there was something to keep them occupied, my friends remembered it and they said better late than never… though there were some good things that happened to stop it like power cuts and a delayed return from a movie, it was still not forgotten… my birthday "bash" happened at 2am on the 28th… 2 days after I was actually born, and after 26 hours of delayed honor… I was suspended by some arms and then there was this funny feeling of levitation after a few whams… it went on like this – a hazy looking leg shooting up and WHAM… lost count after that floating feeling and finally when I was let off, I was feeling as if I had been stealing in the arab countries and been whipped and flogged in public… luckily due to the early morning time, all the eggs were locked up…

It was not over… I was asked to cut a cake – a thick chocolaty one – but that was not to be eaten, at least by me… I was smeared head to foot with chocolate… I have heard of sexy relaxing chocolate baths that were in vogue today… but in no way was this one sexy or fashionable…

Thanks guys for breaking me into the tradition… and thanks for the birthday that I will probably remember for time to come…


PS. Sorry SRK for plagiarizing the title… the least I could do to repay a debt…