Dear Pain Akka,
It’s that time of year and I’m in a panic. Everyone is sending Christmas presents and I don’t know what to send in return. I am very anxious. I want to give clever gifts to everyone but everything I see is either too expensive or too common and what do I do now? Please also tell me what to do with all the gifts I get. I don’t have the heart to throw them away, but I am running out of storage space. This is all very confusing. Please help.
– tired of thinking
receive dear,
I can see that you are attacked by SAS or Seasonal Anxiety Syndrome. First, climb onto the scaffold and bring down all the goodies you’ve accumulated. Dust them off and put on new wrapping paper and re-gift them. Avoid giving A’s gift back to A. You can lose friends. Also avoid giving A’s gift to B if they know each other. They will compare notes. You can lose friends. If A and B never meet, gift A’s 2019 notebook to B and B’s 2018 notebook A. You can get away.
Corona is nothing compared to the dangerous gifting virus that is slowly spreading across India. Now it has reached a dangerous level. People are giving gifts for Christmas, Valentines, Mother’s Day, Boss Day, Gifting Day. Once on Diwali we used to send thali of sweets, now people are sending diyas and idols and knights. In my housing colony, some people’s flats have 5-6 clocks and 10-12 artifacts on each tabletop and no place to rest until a cup of tea.
But once you understand this, gift giving becomes easy. The first step is to recognize that of the gifts we receive, what I call ‘re-give’ gifts. Leading this list are candles and coffee mugs. Candles look beautiful, smell good, and are extremely useless. The mugs are big, with funny words or cartoons, every family has three dozen such mugs, but no one uses them because everyone uses hand-thrown pottery from Pondicherry.
I firmly believe that the only reason people gift candles and mugs is to help the gift giver to gift it to someone else. If our vision ever succeeds in penetrating the dimensions, we will see endless series of such objects moving in circles – mugs and candles and scarves and table napkins following each other and a sort of circle around the earth. Make a ring of Saturn.
Giving gifts is like the wheel of karma – you give what you get. It is part of the glorious Indian heritage. Once upon a time, all the newlyweds used to get 5-6 milk cookers, 7-9 lemonade sets, 12 clocks and 15 trays. The parents used to enthusiastically collect these and put them in Godrej’s cupboard. Then, for each marriage or griha pravesh, one of these would be duly traced and re-gifted. In return that family will gift it in the next marriage. This is the song of ‘Circle of Life’ The Lion King means film.
Of course, if you were Turkish, it would be much easier. Obviously, everyone gifts everyone else red underwear. Wearing them at midnight brings good luck in the new year. Which gives a new meaning to the days of red letters.
– AA
pain.akka@gmail.com
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