My birthday happens to be this week.

As a child, I loved my birthday. It was one of the few times in the year my family indulged in a cake from Flurys, then the ritziest patisserie in Kolkata. I always chose the same one though: a zoo-themed cake with little marzipan animals. My friends came over and we played Pin the Tail on the Donkey with gusto. Some years, we had a piñata, which I whacked with even more gusto. Before mobile phones, only special occasions were deemed worthy of photographs: vacations, graduations, birthdays. The timeline of my childhood can be measured through pictures of birthday parties.

As I grew up, I fell out of love with birthdays. When I lived in the U.S., I remember the carefully timed early morning call, the whole family in India lined up to wish me. Then I would go to work where, at best, I would get a bland automated email from HR. Birthdays became lonelier affairs because I was around people who didn’t know me well enough. Meanwhile back in India, my oldest friends would still stop by home and demand a birthday treat from my mother, my own absence being deemed irrelevant. In time, I even removed my birthday from social media because I got tired of the barrage of birthday greetings from people I barely knew.

The cake-smearing complex

I had no birthday rituals. Not even a bowl of sweet payesh, which many Bengali friends seemed to have. One year in London for my birthday, my aunt made payesh using her precious stash of fragrant “special occasion” Gobindobhog rice. I didn’t tell her my mother never bothered with it; she was happy outsourcing birthday tradition to Flurys. Now the most prevalent desi birthday tradition is to smear each other with gooey chocolate cake. It gives me the shudders.

There is a theory that that tradition comes from Mexico, where the hapless birthday celebrant has their hands tied behind their back and their face pushed into the cake while people chant “¡Mordida!” (“bite!”). I feel it’s the unholy love child of Holi gulal smearing and college ragging. And I’m thankful it was not part of my growing up.

Now, like everything else, birthdays have become the subject of fraught cultural debate. Some complain we need a back-to-the-roots movement for birthdays because instead of wholesome desi traditions like early morning temple visits, aarti and payesh, we just ape Western customs. I honestly never thought too much about the origins of birthday rituals. Later, I learnt that birthday cakes with candles might have something to do with Artemis, the moon goddess of the Greeks. The Irish gave birthday bumps. The Chinese ate longevity noodles while Spaniards pulled your ears, once for each year. We, sadly, chose face-painting with cake!

Perhaps, it’s also a reminder that as India has prospered, we care less about wasting food because we feel with the years of socialist deprivation behind us, we can now have our cake and eat it too. Birthdays are less about the simple act of remembering and more about ostentatious show-and-tell. I hear pet birthdays are the new craze. A pet café in Bengaluru, I’m told, hosts three to four pet birthdays weekly with curated menus, theme décors and budgets up to ₹2 lakh. The dog does not even know it is its birthday.

The people who remember

Who knew your birthday was a marker of your inner circle. We remembered the birthdays of our closest friends by heart. My mother served as a birthday almanac for the family. At every month’s beginning, she rattled off the names of all relatives and their upcoming birthdays and entered the dates into her diary so she’d remember to call them. (She also listed the birthdays of those long dead.)

She was hospitalised at the end of last May. When I opened her diary after she died, I found she’d already entered the June birthday of my cousin’s daughter, a call she never got to make. The birthday girl herself had only met my mother a couple of times. Their relationship was all about that birthday wish. When she heard Ma had died, she told her mother ruefully, “One less person to call me on my birthday.”

It was not just that. She understood there was something special that someone remembered her birthday without the help of a Google calendar or Facebook. And I realised that’s what growing older really means. Having fewer people around who remember your birthday just because they truly care.

They put the happy in a “happy birthday”.

The writer is the author of Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal., and likes to let everyone know about his opinions, whether asked or not.

Published - August 21, 2026 12:28 pm IST