Its 11 PM…I am about to bid good-bye the day that I still
look forward to every year…..My birthday (who doesn’t? – not mine, but for their
own)
But today, I spent some time thinking about how things
change with time. Birthdays, for example, have changed a lot in the past 25
years… (No, I am not 25, but the birthdays before that hardly count :))
When I was in school (primary), birthdays were mostly about
the number of children coming for your birthday party. My family wasn’t big on having
parties with many children around; our birthdays were celebrated low-key
surrounded by siblings and parents. But I remember going for my classmates’
parties and I think that the motto was “The more, the merrier”.
Going on to birthdays in high school (after we moved to India),
it was mostly about the excitement of collecting the daily post to see how many
of my friends have sent me cards. The cards would start coming in a week before
the birthday and would continue to come till almost a week after the birthday.
I remember keeping count to see whether I had made more friends than last year
based on the number of cards. A phone call to the home landline on the birthday
would be the icing of the cake.
Birthdays in college were again about cards and maybe even
some small gifts from friends. Being in hostel and living on a meager pocket
money which included TA, we couldn’t afford any big gifts, so a bookmark or a
small gift item would be the special something to get from and give to special
friends. Letters and cards from classmates, hostel mates, friends who weren’t
in this college…that was the time of abundance.
It was towards the end of college that we got ourselves
email IDs and promised to mail each other long after we left college. So the
first year or two after college, birthdays were less about postal cards but
more about emails from friends and especially e-cards. Hallmark, Bluemountain…you
name it, we’ve been there sending e-cards on birthdays and sending “thank you”
cards as a response to e-cards received.
Then we got jobs…life started revolving around new people,
new friends. With salaries, we could now afford to buy better gifts and we were
back to sending postal cards, only this time they cost more than 10 bucks and
we didn’t feel bad buying them. Along with the job came the mobile phone, and
birthday wishes started coming in the form of SMS and mobile calls.
This trend continues, only now, we check social networking
sites to get our birthday wishes. I spent a good time on Facebook today,
checking messages from friends and family and replying to them. The feeling of
being remembered is definitely nice, but I do have to say that I miss the old
times. I mean, I am not going to log in to FB after 10 years to check the
messages that I got today…but even now, I can open my cupboard and take out my
collection of cards that I have collected since school days and see what my
friends and dear ones wrote to me years ago.
I think we should all try and make it a point
and send cards (actual cards) at least to our dearest friends and family. We
all know how it feels to get a card and open it and read everything in that
card…the admiring of the pictures and the colors used for writing, the
stickers used (we girls do that :))… No e-card, e-message or SMS is ever going to
come close to that feeling. And as usual…I really do hope and pray that our
children will once know this nice feeling.
