Celebrate birthday with someone who genuinely loves

By Sandeep Datta 

It's been 19 years since I lost any charm to celebrate birthdays. It happened after I invited a girl but she failed to turn up. The following year she got married to someone she loved. And, I vowed never to celebrate it. 

But the incident that she did not come and spend that day with me on my birthday hurt me so deeply that I lost any interest in it forever.

But later it made me brood why, how and with whom we need to celebrate this day when we were given birth. 

Over the years, I noticed how strangely people celebrate their birthdays with those who are not even bothered for them. It looks so awkward being greeted by the one who have no affectionate feelings. The one who do have such feeling for us need to wait for any particular day to send their greetings or wish us fortune or success in life. 

Especially in offices, the main concern is Oyee PARTYYY! And, it makes it so bad. A person's special day is reduced to just a samosa-chai party or something like that and no concern in at least greeting him with a heartiest joy. 

All these years, my idea of celebrating not just birthday but any special moment kept evolving in different ways due to various influences. 

From fake friends to so called well wishers cum back-biters or unconcerned classmates or colleagues or just anyone who is least concerned about how we are doing the entire year, all pretend being happy for formality to greet. Who likes it?

Instead, the real joy lies in being greeted by those who actually feel for us everyday. I love being greeted by my closest friends, relatives, relatives and even special former or present-day colleagues. Their every word makes my day. I treasure it.

But I feel on one's birthday, it is one's mother who deserves to be wished. Since it is she who needs to feel how special that day was when she successfully delivered us. 

No matter what but the birthday boy or girl can really make the day extra special by thanking her in an affectionate way for the giant role she played over the years in their lives. 

Going to her, asking her to narrate how it's been for her to bring us up could be wonderful. This could be real gift for her that we at least remember her importance.

Is it too much to expect from ourselves to always feel grateful to our parents who  made our existence possible? And, for the kind of role they played in our lives.

Without parents we could have never existed. Isn't it so strange that most of us turn 

so absorbed in our career, studies, enjoyments and challenges that we forget our parents's actual importance in our world.  

Sometimes it looks so saddening to see the way we treat our parents as just ATM machines. Many of us don't mind staying away from them for weeks, months, and at times years for the sake of career. 

Isn't is shameful for many of us who leave our parents to fend for themselves in old age? While celebrating how many us think of spending the evening or the day just with parents and make them feel extra special at least for that day of remembrance? 

After marriage, the possibility of even recalling or making our better half realise our parents' worth in our existence, ends in no time?  

It is difficult to imagine how most of us or today's kids feel when they look at large billboards showing photos of parents bidding goodbye to children leaving for abroad?  What comes to mind when a wife or servant serves food with hardly any love in it like our mothers?

Why do we forget the way parents brought us up, the way they tolerated us despite our stupidities, failures, embarrassing moments?  How they would have managed when we used to be most irritating whole day and did not let our mothers sleep even for an hour after schooltime despite fever or exhausting day? 

Why do we forget who used to dress up us for school or prepare us whole day before or after school time for tests or just for the next day?  What makes us forget that whatever we know today could not have been possible had it not been for our father's sacrifices of his personal enjoyments or mothers' help and support?

Today, many of us may look at our parents like individuals good for nothing or someone who are always poking their nose in our 'personal' life or someone who better mind their own business even if it means waiting for our safe return from college or office on time? Why don't we realise we need not make our parents' old age a punishment to live alone  and suffer in silence?  

But hats off to those who value parents everyday even when they are no more in a condition to be of any help. 

On our birthdays, perhaps, it could be best gift and greeting for our parents if we could spare just a few moments for them when they could feel being our true friends, advisers, and special caretakers or simply our parents and not a burden anymore.