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Paromita Vohra: Happy Birthday to Everyone

Updated on: 22 October,2017 05:58 AM IST  |  Mumbai
Paromita Vohra | paromita.vohra@mid-day.com

On the first day of the year, January 1, many of us indulge in electoral promises, yaniki, making new year resolutions

Paromita Vohra: Happy Birthday to Everyone


Illustration/Ravi Jadhav


On the first day of the year, January 1, many of us indulge in electoral promises, yaniki, making new year resolutions. In my youth, I did this with such belief that I would make a whole time table of resolutions accommodating every subject of life from PT to home science, so to speak. Because life is simply a growing awareness and acceptance of one's limits and limitations, my resolutions have been inching from fantasy to optimism to ambition to pragmatism, finally coming to rest at the final destination of modesty.


This year, I wanted to make a resolution I would keep. So, I resolved to wish everyone I knew on their birthday. In my mind, I was trying to build on a strength, not mend a weakness. You see I love birthdays — which is one way of saying I'm likely to hold it against you if you forget mine. I've always been good at remembering birthdays, throwing surprise parties and even buying interesting presents, one of my few nice qualities. But, of late, too busy with work, I had been slipping up on the life front. I figured I had Facebook for help — that place where birthday reminders trickle in through the day. No sooner had I made the resolution, than I began to break it. If anything I became worse than before. I would be reminded, then forget to act on the reminder. Soon, I became one of those people who writes Happy Birthday in the comments box below the morning-after status message where the birthday person writes their Oscars-style thank you note.


Then I began to forget the birthdays of people I used to remember before Facebook, including my oldest friends. Soon, self-loathing and disappointment overwhelmed me so much, I would click glumly on each day's birthdays, but feel unable to act on them. It was akin to the feeling (for those old enough to remember) every time your eye fell on an unreturned library book. It was the fines that mounted, but it was you that became irredeemable.

The good thing about living in a country with many faiths and communities, is that there are many new years. So, on Navroze, Vishu, Gudi Padwa and even Eid, which is not a new year, I exhorted myself, "you can still make this work. Consider this the real new year and strive for perfection." Now however, it seems, the last new year of the year is over — the one following Diwali. There is nowhere left to go. I admit to failing completely. Perhaps there is something about the idea of perfection that dooms us to disaffection. So keen are we to be the pre-decided best, that somehow we start to find the best we reveal ourselves as being, or someone else, for that matter, somehow unworthy. If it can't be ekdum, exactly ideal, then surely it's hardly worth considering, only worth rejection. Resolutions are the road to self-hate and hatred of all the people who record their fitness goals on social media. On Diwali.

Now, the last two months of the year are upon us. Perhaps it's best to contemplate how to be kinder to our limited selves instead of setting ourselves up on a yearly basis for failure. In that spirit, as I eat another resolution free kaju katli, Happy Birthday to Everybody.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevipictures.com

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