“Many Happy Returns of the day. Happy Onam.” I type into the comment box of the birthday girl. Sometimes I replace Onam with Easter or something equally inane. Mostly, nobody reads the comment. Sometimes someone may like it. Rarely is it commented upon – even though I may have wished you Happy Moharram on your birthday. If I had 100+ repetitive, predictable comments on my timeline, I would ignore them too. Or mechanically like them. There’s probably an app for that.
So now when Facebook reminds me that it is XYZ’s birthday and “I should help them celebrate by wishing them” I don’t. The “wish people on facebook” has gone beyond farcical into the territory of satire.
More people communicating through Facebook makes Facebook richer. Not me. So I refuse to be a tool to be used by Facebook. Honestly, I don’t care to wish that colleague from the dark ages or the girl-I-met-once-on-vacation a happy birthday. And I really don’t care if they wish me. To me Facebook is a convenient way to keep-in-touch with people far away. Facebook calls it a friendship. I don’t. To check that reality, try borrowing large sums of money from each of your “friends”. That should be fun!
So I changed the privacy settings for my own birthday and made it invisible on Facebook. Yes, you can do that.
Nobody wished me on Facebook this year, and you know what? I feel great.
So how did I celebrate my birthday? What did I do?
I celebrated my birthday by doing the things I enjoy. I’ve wanted to explore the walking path from our home to a village named Lveshal. It is a 
40 km round trip by car. On my birthday, my-favourite-person-in-the-world and I packed a little day-pack and we ventured out to find the walking trail. We got lost, discovered a waterfall, had tea and oranges in the forest, then we found a road on which we walked for 4 km. We came across one vehicle in those 4 km and finally reached Lveshal. There we had chai-samosa, got directions to the actual trail and then hiked back on it along a stream. Along the way we also saw some beautiful birds, and found a gorgeous tail-feather almost 12 inches long. The 13k hike took us five hours, so after coming home I took a well-deserved nap. While I slept my-favourite-person-in-the-world – who was equally tired after the walk – baked me a cake. My kids gave me a birthday card which they had made by sticking beads on paper. Good luck buying those – and the feeling which comes with it – in a store. After dark we lit a wood-fire in the bukhari and I cut in the cake to loud singing by the kids. Then we had Chinese food for dinner.
It was my most wonderful birthday ever.
With social media we land up maintaining hundreds of superficial relationships instead of focusing on a few important ones. Instead of doing deep, we go wide. But I would take a few deep relationships over a thousand shallow ones.
If after reading this blog you immediately open up facebook to wish me a belated birthday, you really didn’t get it, did you?
P.s. This doesn’t fit with the article, but wanted to share anyway. I didn’t get a single gift, for which I am grateful. I already have way too much stuff, and way to little space to keep it. I don’t need another bobble-head or another mug with my name on it. The one thing hard to find where we live is decent beer. Everything else, either I already have or I don’t need.
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