birthdays
and their varied celebration
this week’s Thought (singular)
public transport my beloved
hi
i’m so fascinated by the endless variety of birthday celebrations, despite the thread of commonality that runs through them all. in my head, birthday celebrations are split into four temporal categories - Pureness, childhood, The Sadness Years, and enlightenment.
Pureness birthdays are by far my favourite, simply for how distinctive they are. paper plates with cake from sweet chariot/cake walk and unbranded potato chips, usually touching each other. the forbidden coke/fanta/mirinda in paper cups that have obscure fruit-themed designs printed on them. kids from the apartment you’ve met once, and gifts from toys r us. return gifts that are usually some sort of lunchbox with an eclairs inside them. a magician to entertain the screaming near-infants, who makes us play big-fish-small-fish. if we’re being particularly adventurous, a balloon twister/face painter, for the balloon giraffes that make too much noise and the blue butterflies on our cheeks. celebrations in these years are so spectacularly particular, and they hold a special type of magic, fully contained in the duration and space of the party itself. you only realise you’re in that very lovely capsule when you step out of it.
childhood birthdays are all about the pizza hut and the mcdonald’s (and on one memorable year, the pizza corner). these are simultaneously the most organised and the most chaotic ones. parents calling for directions (“no, not the indiranagar one, the ulsoor one,”), musical chairs, driving away prospective customers through sheer loudness and bedlam - also a special type of magic. this is the first phase where you begin to invite school friends, leading to a sneaking suspicion that they exist outside of the hours in which you’re around them. it’s all very disorienting, and at least to the kids, it’s ridiculously fun. not so much for the parents. or the waiters at papa john’s (whose ice-cream machine is always broken). and definitely not for the patrons who are unlucky enough to come in at the exact hour of a pre-teen birthday party.
now what can i say about The Sadness Years that hasn’t already been said? i don’t call them that because they’re sad per se; only because they feel directionless. or rather, they feel directed at externals. all grown up, we move from fast food joints to movie theatres, laser tag arenas, paintball fields, arcades - no parents, lots of competition, an acute feeling of i’m-too-old-for-this-and-i’m-not-going-to-make-a-big-deal-of-it. they’re the years of craving independence, but not knowing how to function without your parents. i could centre an entire thodi edition around this, and i probably will, but the bottom line on The Sadness Years - they seem fun when they’re happening, but their memory is always tinged with a bit of discomfort.
the enlightenment years manifest themselves in different ways. this is the era of parties (in the traditional sense), going shopping for birthday clothes without your mother, and the discontinuation of the chocolate-distribution event. but, more to the point of what i’m trying to say, it’s the era of closeness with loved ones, when birthdays lean more towards reflection and gratitude than celebration. it’s the era of ordering cake to a friend’s house and directing the delivery person with your own half-baked knowledge of the layout of your friend’s apartment. of coming to terms with your own vulnerability, of facing loneliness head-on, of trying to understand why you’ve cried on every birthday in the last few years. new traditions are heralded with a sense of freedom. somebody recently told me that she takes the day off and goes for a hike every year alone. another sends an email to her future self, thus receiving one every year from her one-year-ago self. this feels like settling, not in the less-than sense, but more in the clarity-after-the-dust-settles sense. like something settles inside you with a deep sigh of relief. it feels like finding your place, and finding your peace.
there’s so much more to be said about this; about how you can hate your birthday so much that replying to the wishes can seem like a gargantuan task; about how you’re afraid to get excited, because what if you’re let down; about realising that a friend’s forgotten, that somebody you don’t talk to anymore hasn’t reached out and the disappointment comes despite the fact that you weren’t really expecting them to. it’s the day of coming to terms with changes and growth, and like the changes and growth themselves, it can be difficult. but that’s the great thing about the enlightenment years - you have years to figure it out. birthdays aren’t going anywhere. if you’re on an endless running track, every subsequent hurdle sees you better equipped to handle it than the last.
ps: happy february! happy birthday to my fellow february birthday-havers!
pps: if you have any birthday traditions, let me know! they all seem so cool, and i’m genuinely interested for entirely selfish reasons.
English Recitation Competition
I Love The Dark Hours Of My Being, Rainer Maria Rilke
So I am sometimes like a tree rustling over a gravesite and making real the dream of the one its living roots embrace: a dream once lost among sorrows and songs.
Brother, I’ve seen some, Kabir (translated from Hindi by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra)
This verse, says Kabir, Is your key to the universe. If you can figure it out.
Novel, Arthur Rimbaud (translated from French by Wallace Fowlie)
You are in love. Occupied until the month of August. You are in love. —Your sonnets make Her laugh. All your friends go off, you are ridiculous. —Then one evening the girl you worship deigned to write to you . . . ! —That evening, . . . —you return to the bright cafés, You ask for beer or lemonade . . . —We're not serious when we are seventeen And when we have green linden trees in the park.
A Poll!
Middle School Book Review
your regularly scheduled book recommendation has been temporarily halted. watch this space over the coming weeks so you don’t miss the next one!
find all shared books here.
A Picture!
The Good Side of the Internet
Her medium: the cremains of departed loved ones. Her mission: to change your perspective on the end of life.
Gazawood Dreams (blurb from Longreads)
Paul Fischer travels to Gaza to profile cinema-loving twin brothers Tarzan and Arab (Ahmed and Mohamed Abu Nasser). It’s Fischer’s evocative details that bring this story to life, one of two brothers who are united in their movie-making obsession, their “greatest defence against death” in a country beleaguered by war, a place where all the movie theatres closed the year before they were born. “They called their studio Gazawood. Its walls plastered in collages of images, Gazawood was like a psychological and emotional bunker, sheltering them from the fighter jets roaring overhead, the whipcrack of rockets firing in the distance, the sectarian arguments in the febrile streets.”
The redemption arc, in clumsy hands, becomes cheesy and unbelievable, offending good taste more often than not. Granted. But literature has, in the past, found ways to handle this sort of plot delicately, and to great effect. After all, the question of how a person changes ought to absolutely possess a novelist – as a matter of philosophical inquiry, but also as a representation of a real phenomenon that can and sometimes even does happen. Ideas about redemption motivated Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; degradation and disgrace – another form of moral transformation that might be understood as the redemption arc’s darker twin – were magnificently explored through the Shakespearean tragedies, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, even Proust’s humiliated M. Swann.
How Smart Tech Tried to Solve the Mental Health Crisis and Only Made It Worse
Crisis Text Line was supposed to be the exception. Skyrocketing rates of depression, anxiety, and mental distress over the last decade demanded new, innovative solutions. The non-profit organization was founded in 2013 with the mission of providing free mental health text messaging services and crisis intervention tools. It seemed like the right moment to use technology to make the world a better place. Over the following years, the accolades and praise the platform received reflected its success. But their sterling reputation was tarnished overnight at the beginning of 2022 when Politico published an investigation into the way Crisis Text Line had handled and shared user data. The problem with the organization, however, goes well beyond its alleged mishandling of user information.
Rilke on the Lonely Patience of Creative Work
“Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them.”
this week’s Song
find all shared songs here.
thank you for reading, and see you next week <3
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