Dear Agony Akka,
It’s that time of the year and I am in a panic. Everybody is sending Christmas gifts 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 commonplace and now what shall I do? Also please tell me what to do with all the gifts I get. I don’t have the heart to throw them, but I am running out of storage space. It’s all very confusing. Please help.
— Got Exhausted Thinking
Dear GET,
I can see that you have been attacked by SAS or Seasonal Anxiety Syndrome. First of all, climb up to the loft and bring down all the gifts you have accumulated. Dust them and put new wrapping paper and re-gift them. Avoid giving A’s gift back to A. You might lose friends. Also avoid giving A’s gift to B if they know each other. They will compare notes. You might lose friends. If A and B will never meet, then gift A’s 2019 stole to B and B’s 2018 notebook to A. You might get away.
Corona is nothing compared to the dangerous gifting virus that is slowly spreading across India. It has now reached alarming proportions. People are giving gifts for Christmas, Valentine, Mother’s Day, Boss Day, Gifting Day. One time, we sent plates of sweets for Diwali, now people are sending lamps and idols and knick-knacks. In my housing colony, some people’s flats are having 5-6 clocks and 10-12 artefacts on each and every tabletop and no place to rest one cup of tea even.
But gifting is easy once you get the hang of it. The first step is to identify what I call the ‘re-givable’ gifts among the gifts we receive. Leading this list are candles and coffee mugs. The candles look pretty, smell nice, and are supremely useless. The mugs are large, with funny words or cartoons, every family has three dozen such mugs, but nobody uses them because everyone uses hand-thrown pottery mugs from Pondicherry anyway.
I strongly believe that the only reason people gift candles and mugs is to help the giftee so that he or she can gift it to someone else. If our eyesight ever manages to pierce through the dimensions, we will see endless chains of such items going around in circles — mugs and candles and scarves and table napkins following each other and forming a sort of Saturn’s ring around the earth.
Gifting is like karmic cycle — you give what you get. It is part of glorious Indian heritage. Once upon a time, all newlyweds would get 5-6 milk cookers, 7-9 lemonade sets, 12 clocks and 15 trays. Parents would collect these zealously and stow them away in a Godrej almirah. Then, for every wedding or grihapravesham, one of these would be duly unearthed and re-gifted. In turn, that family would gift it at the next wedding. This is what the ‘Circle of Life’ song from Lion King movie means.
Of course, if you were Turkish, it would be much easier. Apparently, everybody gifts everybody else red underwear. Wearing these at midnight is supposed to bring good luck for the new year. Which gives red letter days a whole new meaning.
— AA
agony.akka@gmail.com
