When my sister and I were children, our birthdays passed by without a ripple. For the middle class, the birthday cake and singing of "Happy Birthday" had not yet become mandatory, and all that my mother did was to prepare payesh (kheer to north Indians), having a spoonful or two of which was considered to be auspicious. It is only when our children began to grow up that birthdays began to be celebrated regularly in our family, and we came across the unique institution of the "return gift". I then had no difficulty in declaring that social practices had gone too far when the parents of one of our daughter's class friends at nursery school celebrated her birthday at Delhi's Taj Man Singh.
My own life had changed a little when I met the person who eventually became my spouse. She believed in celebrating birthdays with gusto and a key part of it was coming up with a carefully chosen greetings card. She surprised me once by chucking not one but two such cards at me, saying she could not make up her mind on which one to choose and so there were the two, and I could throw away the one which I liked less.
Throughout my adult life, I have periodically had both friends and professional acquaintances wish me on my birthday. But once they have realised that I did not reciprocate by wishing them on theirs, the flow of such good wishes has dried up. All to the good, I have thought.
There have been one or two exceptions to this rule. A small group of people - my closest relatives and friends - have taken me for what I am and carried on wishing me irrespective of whether I have reciprocated or not. In recent years, after retirement, these friends have usually prefaced their wishes with words like, "at this stage people like us should be forgetting, not celebrating, our birthdays".
As if this was not enough, something far more serious has started happening in the last few years. An increasing number of computer systems have begun wishing me on my birthday. First it was my bank, when I decided to fall in line with the times and went in for internet banking. Then it was the investment bank with which I maintain my demat account - in which reside a few forlorn shares, which I had acquired during a period of distraction and which I do not know what to do with, discard or cherish.
Thereafter, it was my cellphone operator that presumably tried to make amends by greeting me on my birthday to make up for all the pestering messages to "please pay the bill on time" sent through the year, even though I am never late on that account. And once I have shifted to Kolkata and acquired another cellphone number, the second operator's computer has followed suit.
I know that as you get older, fewer and fewer people will keep in touch with you. But it is still a bit unnerving to see ahead of you a time when, with the digital revolution striking deeper roots, it is mostly a little army of computer systems that will remember your birthday. The ultimate science-fiction reality that looms ahead is robots - much more like real human beings than they are today and with intelligence far ahead of most humans, taking over the ritual greetings.
In Japan, I am told, young people who live far away from parents who insist on staying in their highland cottages in the harsh north have worked out an alternative. They hire real-life humans who on, say, Japanese New Year, come and wish the parents all the best, acting every bit like the actual children. I can't decide which would be better, or worse - being greeted by such hired hands or by intelligent robots who get off the van, ring the doorbell, deliver joyful lifelike greetings, and then wave and get back to the van, and be gone.
Till that happens, in the last couple of years our son has been trying to be a bit different and imaginative. Last year, he texted me, "When I was your age, I, too, was an optimist. Happy birthday." The wife and I had a good laugh. This year he has messaged me a part of the lyric from one of my favourite Joan Baez songs, which goes like this, "May your hands always be busy/May your feet always be swift/And may you have a strong foundation/ When the winds of changes shift./May your heart always be joyful/May your song always be sung ... "; and then the refrain with which every stanza ends, "And may you stay forever young/Forever young … ".
subirkroy@gmail.com
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