HBD Forsooth!

Sometime between odd hours and 6 AM on 11th Dec, my wife called out “Happy Birthday” in her sleep, I said, “Thank You”, I think we smiled at each other and that was that. The horror started around 6.15 AM when a batchmate, not much of a friend but almost-human all the same, wrote the momentous legend in a rather large batchmates’ Whatsappp group, “HBD, Mani”. And all hell broke loose with batchmates of myriad descriptions inflicting me with vacuous messages exhorting me to achieve the impossible in my remaining life span which they wished would go on forever. “Live forever and keep spreading sunshine like you always do”, “We rejoice with you as you celebrate your birthday today. The very best is yet to come” and “May your special day be filled with all the good things that you deserve, and may all your wishes come true”. Indeed! Just because some aged guys with nothing much to do except issuing idle decrees that I should now tread the path leading to all good things, I now had to laboriously write a damn acknowledgement to all of them.

Batchmates’ groups. Yes, these are those cardinal ubiquitary bunches you must have; ones starting from your middle school, high school, college, professional college and then the profession itself. Most other groups have generally been reined in by the administrators proscribing insipid greetings and stupid forwards. Insipid greetings include wishes for you on festivals you had never heard of and, since you already have a zillion, could do very well without the addition of such trite as Akshaya Tritiya, Govardhan Pooja, Maundy Thursday and Mari? Himmelfahrt. Or what the king of hooey on Wahtsapp sends, the inscrutable, “Have a Good Tuesday”. Forwards, on the other hand are many types. The most common being the ones from those inflicted with Compulsive Forwarding Syndrome, which are never read by anyone, the sender or the receiver, only forwarded from one idiot to a group of idiots. One really irritating is the one supremely boring, even by the essentially lowly, lifeless and childish yardstick of Whatsapp jokes, and also the annoying one which is terribly contrived and lengthy, asking you to scroll a thousand times downwards. Did you kill, with bare hands, the person who recently tried to tell you a joke, reading it from his phone? Maybe not but if you had, I would fight your case on the plea of self defence. Not to forget those who threaten you in the beginning of the post that the wrath of some God, or gods, would befall upon you if you failed to read, or more specifically, forward, the bananas they sent to you. Or the presumptuous ones which proclaim, Must read or Must share; just because some dumbass has a puerile sense of humour or an impoverished intellect coupled with an A+in gullibility, you have to piss away your precious time finding the Delete button.

Talking of these gullible ones, they too come in many sizes. The petite size are those who believe some trash already and a post favourable to their belief is instantly swallowed and digested. The medium size ones are those who would believe anything thrown at them as long as it was on an email or a cell phone forward. And plus size ones are the most difficult to deconstruct. They would never believe what you tell them face to face, in spite of your quoting authentic sources, because they are inherently argumentative and their job on earth is to differ, disagree and dispute. But bung at them some harebrained inanity digitally and they would absorb it hook, line and sinker.

Then there are these Facebook birthday wishes. Facebook is world's favorite social network and has its benefits. But a lot of benefits are balanced out by the all-pervasive natural stupidity which reigns there. There are those who think that their Facebook page is their public photo album and that all their friends, or in many cases, the whole world of Facebook community, are actually going to like seeing their mug or torso from five different angles, at home or wherever they could be holidaying at. Poppycock remarks from 500 friends follow and all of them now have a license to pay back in the same coin with their own version of photographic narcissistic baloney. But wait a second, these Facebook vacationers also declare where they are headed on vacation, perhaps pasting a snap from the airport or expressway. Surely a good pointer for burglars. Or those who want to tell the whole world that they had a stomach upset, or even more seriously, that they went for a CT Scan and there whatever was going to crumble. Now who would it really interest, except the health insurers, who would now hike their damn premiums. Basically, people crave for attention and recognition but most of us do not get it more than we deserve, so we have Facebook now, which is like I scratch your back, you scratch mine and voilà! I have so much attention now that I spend two hours every day clearing my Facebook bull and fatuity.

OK, so I do not care much, or even hate, to be wished on my birthday or for that matter a greeting for just about anything from a Good Morning to Happy Govardhan Puja. In case of birthday wishes, it is a bit tricky. It is possible that some of the messages are not a part of a parade of mini messages that emanate from the sender but a special one. Some of them could possibly be generated after some thought behind the act. Many certainly are those which were caused by Facebook Calendar reminding them about my birthday and I get the message on auto pilot but I would think not all. Would it be within the bounds of normal if I just posted an omnibus thank you message? O do I have the benefit of doubt, being excused as careless and absent-minded about such things, buttressed by known nature to be inattentive to other similar messages? I do not know so I hobble along, cursing but replying on impulse.

Looking at my dilemma, someone suggested that I should keep my birthday hidden on Facebook and similar platforms so I would have only friends who actually remembered my birthday poke me that day. Well, first of all, I like them poking me but not particularly on my birthday. And what? I now need Facebook to uncover my real friends. Not for me.

This catharsis of sorts does not include you, dear reader, if you were impolite enough to wish me a happy birthday. You are excused and excluded. And, in spite of all the angst I hold against these HBD types, I did appreciate some of the messages this time round. I do not know if they were original or recirculated but liked reading them. Some samples:

Kind of Happy Birthday, pal! They say age is just a number. For you, it’s a really really big number.

Many many happy returns of the day. They say that with age comes wisdom. That must make you one of the wisest persons in the world!

You’re finally old enough where your hair loss is no longer premature. Enjoy your birthday!

I know you don’t like birthdays, but, good news, there probably aren’t many left. So as long as you’re still around, make the most of it. Happy birthday! 

Come to think about it, what’s this fuss about birthdays. For a child it is an excuse to celebrate with friends and family and the parents plan for it with the child immersed in blissful anticipation. A birthday is a day as good any. But since you cannot do it every day, the concept of birthdays was invented. Adults do not need an occasion to celebrate and even if they do, why make it so presumptuous as to have it on a day when you were ushered in the world.

Let me turn to the bard in Antony and Cleopatra. It is Cleopatra’s birth day, she is looking or an opportunity to celebrate but Antony is pissed off due to the spiteful visit of Caesar’s messenger. He somehow gets a new wind and orders for all wine pitchers to be filled up. A forsaken Cleopatra is delighted and says, “It is my birthday. I had thought t’ have held it poor; but since my lord Is Antony again, I will be Cleopatra.” Meaning that birthday or no birthday, she is more happy celebrating Antony’s change of disposition.

I like to ignore, not hate, birthdays in general and therefore, this treatment, first and foremost, for my own. And since that is so, would it not be smugly pretentious to think that my birthday really mattered to others? It is certainly not masochistic. I do not detest that I was born. How can I detest it because I do not know what would have happened to me had I not been born? Now, since this bluster is becoming dangerously mystical, challenging my very being, I must invite Ghalib to decipher it for me.

Na thā kuchh to ?hudā thā kuchh na hotā to ?hudā hotā

Duboyā  mujh ko hone ne na hotā mai?  to kyā hotā

God was present when it was all void, God would still be there if it would be all nothingness. My existence has drowned me, what would it be if I did not exist. It also means that when I was nothing, I was God and if I were nothing ever, I would be God. A mystical imagery and thought about omnipresence of God in every being with a play on futility of existence and the surrealism of non-existence. The sense is that if I did not exist, one may speculate what I would be and dilating on that, would it be of any harm or consequence? Now, since the first misra already says that God is present in non-existence, I would be God. Presence of God is not as manifest as any mundane existence which, with all its worldly artifice, banal functions and false wisdom, is in the realm of ordinary perception. This lack of enlightenment leads us to make distinctions between the creator and the created whereas they both are inseparable, the suffused truth. In this background, let us make a plausible tashreeh of the sher. When I was nothing, I was God but unfortunately, having become something, I am immersed in a sea of untruth, detached from the omnipresent and benevolent creator and this worldly existence away from the Truth is of no meaning.

No comparison but I quote Dahir Dehlavi here on the Sufi takhayyul:

thā anal-haq l ab-e-mansūr* pe kyā aap se aap

thā jo parde me? chhupā bol uThā aap se aap

*I am Truth, I am God, Sufi Mansoor was hanged for proclaiming this.

And with this, I sign off with a disclaimer for friends and family who wish me well, that I wrote this with malice towards none and I value their wishes and greetings. Amen!

(to be continued on my next birthday…)