CHENNAI: This year was supposed to be it. I was going to turn 23 years old, which meant that I was just young enough to wake up after a big night without a hangover, and just old enough for a costume birthday party to be socially acceptable. I even had a friend committed to dressing as a cookie; now, a spectacular sight that I might never see! With my plans marred, I grumpily reach out, to get the feel of the times, from other people under Aries, and fellow Taureans. I expect a sense of wallowing and self-pity sessions, but instead get, from the many cancelled birthday plans and isolating conditions, an emerging pattern of optimism and appreciation.
The makeover
Amid a chaotic midnight game of Secret Hitler with her college friends, in which a few didn’t know the rules, few who couldn’t care less, and one who couldn’t get Zoom to work, Varuna Raja, a recent Master’s graduate from Symbiosis International, Pune, turned 22 on April 3. “Since my birthday fell on a Friday this year, I was looking forward to taking a weekend-long trip with my college friends, which then got cut to a trip to Coimbatore,” begins the Madurai-native. “In the end, I just spent the day with family at home. But it doesn’t matter as long as I have my birthday cake.
It’s the one thing I can’t go without,” she adds excitedly. Not allowing the lack of availability of butter to deter her, you’d be glad to note, that Varuna did enjoy her butter-less cake after all! Keeping to the tune of improvised birthday cakes, Reana Taara decided to skip the traditional route altogether and make herself a birthday pizza. At home in Tiruvannamalai, the 23-year-old confesses to never having birthday plans work out. A massive cricket fan, Reane gushes over the CSK match she had tickets to on her birthday. But taking it all in stride, she decided to make her birthday a day of giving. “With my father on the board of TDH Core Trust, we usually celebrate with the kids there, even when I’m away.
This year, I made it a point to be present and hand out food packets to people on the streets as well,” she expresses with an air of gratitude. And as these unique conditions evolve daily, one thing’s for sure; there are surprises everywhere. Landing in India on March 13, from Ireland, Kaarthic RS found himself under mandated quarantine for his landmark 25th birthday. An extrovert by nature, he confesses that he expected this birthday to be nothing but another mundane experience. And that was just it until he was proved wrong. Getting a first-hand glimpse or rather taste of the best of human friendship, cakes and a bottle of rose-milk were dropped off by friends, from a safe distance.
“I was planning to gift all my close friends some Irish memorabilia for my birthday, but in the end, they gifted me something far more memorable instead,” he says. And as Kaarthic found refuge among friends, Shreya Verma looked to her family. “I’ve come home to Bhopal since the lockdown, and I’m glad to be here. I’ve never been big on birthdays, but wearing a nice set of new clothes for the day has been a little tradition I like to keep,” she says. Adding a dash of lipstick to her birthday outfit, she laughs as she tells me how much she enjoys the virtual birthday attention. “I walked around my house on my birthday, and I’m pretty sure my family didn’t remember for a while. But we enjoyed a wonderful lunch together, which is not very common due to my work-from-home schedule,” adds the associate consultant at Sattva. Yes, it’s fair to say that the coronavirus pandemic has been a party pooper. But multiple conversations hint strongly at the resilience of the human spirit.
Alicia M, a Chennai native, in fact, looks forward to a birthday that she can enjoy by herself, without the anxiety of ‘birthday stuff ’. There’s finally a palpable appreciation in the air for the little things in life — cakes, friendship and a dash of lipstick. It does seem like you can have your cake and eat it too, after all! And learning from this note of positivity, maybe the opportunity to convince my friend to adorn a cookie costume on Zoom might be a worthy endeavour after all!