Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday to you! Oh fuck off! I don't care about you too.

Facebook has done a very nice thing about reminding people of birthdays. A quick notification on the phone telling us ‘to celebrate so and so’s birthday’ does work wonders when you have forgotten about it. Birthdays deserve to be forgotten though. The only people who deserve to celebrate birthdays are the ones going through extreme difficulty… People battling war and battling life threating diseases. For most of us, we celebrate our achievement of surviving another year of eating and sleeping. The problems with the lifestyle will be addressed another day, but it is the fact that we feel the need to celebrate “surviving” this lifestyle is what rattles me. It’s a day when rules don’t apply to us. We can do anything we want and it wouldn’t have any consequences. While we don’t really care about the rules the rest of the 364 days, on the birthday we make sure we break them with pride. The problem has gone in so deep that birthdays have messed up the sociology of today’s youth. Interpersonal relations either thrive or fall apart because of the birthday. The expectations that come along with the birthday are cockamamie.

I remember I was ecstatic when I got an air-gun as a birthday present. I used to shoot table-tennis balls. I wonder if Osama Bin Laden’s kids got a brand new AK-47 on their birthday. Maybe his 9 year old son was upset because he did not get a grenade launcher instead. The computer game Counter Strike should be renamed ‘Biography of Osama’. Even Manhoman Singh must be having expectations on his birthday. For one day he would like to be able to talk for the entire day and people to care what he talks about! You always know this one person from your group of friends who talks a lot and you just want to say, just shut up man, nobody gives a fuck. I think someone did that to Manmohan Singh when he was a kid and he just took it way too seriously. Rahul Gandhi’s birthday wish would be for the country to believe him when he says that all he wants is for women to be empowered and the youth to be in power.

Just like the politicians, every one has a birthday expectation. The birthday wish expectation is the biggest of them all. Everyone expects Johnny Depp or Anne Hathaway to personally wish them or ‘retweet’ because several years ago their father got laid. Even friends and family do not escape the birthday expectations. The ‘Birthday Greeting Expectations Pyramid’ gives a brief explanation of the various stages of birthday greetings. The ones at the top of receive several benefits throughout the entire year but have to face maximum expectation levels during the birthday. Or some have to suffer these birthday demands for a longer duration as their special person prefers to celebrate the birthday, birthday week and birthday month. It is rather unfortunate that no one wants to celebrate a birthday year. That would definitely show intellectual development of the brain.

Since we are all into celebrating birthdays, maybe we should celebrate all the important days in the year. Google is the only intelligent one for having the Google Doodles. We should have an individual Google Doodle to remind us the important days in our life. We would lead and live a better life if we remember and look forward to the day when we actually start living a life instead of looking forward to the day which only takes us towards death.

P.S. Things get awkward when you switch levels in the pyramid but the birthday person does not.