Birthdays were pretty tame affairs in the conservative milieu of India we grew up in. My mom, unfailingly, would indulge us with our favorite payasam, when any of our family birthdays came around. Till I was ten years or so, there were also new birthday dresses, and a bunch of candies to share with friends.
As for the adults in the family though, it was primarily a payasam treat and not much else. Except when an elder in the family crossed sixty years, or eighty and odd years (the shatabhiskekam, marking the blessing of having seen a thousand full moons). At these times, the extended family would gather for special religious ceremonies and celebration.
Things have changed dramatically. Nowadays, birthdays for kids, and even adults, are high-voltage events, with clowns, cakes, balloons and themed parties providing amusement and entertainment in ample measure. The simplicity of earlier times is gone. But there’s more to this than meets the eye. The complex culture that India is, even the simplicity of old was not without its merry share of confusion.
What we commonly refer to as the birthday is actually called the ‘English’ birthday. This is (ostensibly) the actual date of birth, and serves to mark records for the outer world of school and work. Straightforward? Not quite. Aside from English birthdays, there is also the star or ‘nakshatra’ birthday, corresponding to the asterism of the heavens one was born under in the year of birth. This star birthday holds significance from an astrological perspective. It has only a slim chance of coinciding with the English one in any given year. When it came around, mom would take us to the nearby temple, to make prayers and offerings on our behalf. The English birthday was for fun and cake with friends. The star birthday, in contrast, was quasi-religious and more of a personal affair. As a kid, I can recall the payasam treat on both birthdays.
For a long while, I thought this dual nuance was all there was to it for birthdays. And then, in my junior year of college, my horizons broadened in the most interesting manner.
In the summer of 1989, a bunch of my classmates interned along with me at the stately Bharat Petroleum Corporation (BPCL) in Mumbai. The gigantic refinery was our first practical exposure to big industry, and as with most college summer internships, we made sure it was a time of nonstop fun. The BPCL internship was much sought after, both for its generous stipend, and for the sumptuous corporate lunch we could eat daily in the management cafeteria, for the ridiculous sum of 50 paise! Our days began at 5:30 am, when we would begin our two-hour commute from our college dorms. Switching bus, train and car, we would make our way through the early morning crush of suburban Mumbai, to reach the sprawling factory premises by 7:30 am.
Signing in, we would barely have time to catch breakfast, before reporting to the head of the department we were assigned, for the daily 8 am factory-wide bulletin. This session would be held on intercom, in the office of the individual department manager we were rotating through in our internship for that week. The bulletin consisted of unintelligible announcements about production schedules, piping leaks, volume targets and safety measures, and generally bored the pants off us. We would switch off attention for the most part, but towards the end of each morning’s bulletin, the announcer would read out the names of people in the factory who had their birthdays that day. This would usually be a list of under ten people, with the average being six or seven. Huddled around the intercom, the other interns and I would make this a little betting game for every morning. We instituted a grand prize for whoever amongst us would have the best accuracy of predictions for daily birthday counts, over the entire internship period. It was one of several little fun games we made up to keep our long days interesting.
The morning of the 1st of June dawned like any other day, the sky overcast with pre-monsoon clouds as we gazed out of the department head’s room we were gathered in. We each wrote our guesses for the number of birthdays to be announced that day in a common notebook, to be compared at the end of all the birthday announcements. After the drone of production updates and senior executive messages came the birthday list. Our ears now perked up for the all-important count that would decide our betting fortunes. We had our pencils and pens at the ready, to keep individual tally counts in our notepads for cross-validation.
The first few names, up to ten, came through loud and clear. In a few moments though, the count went past 15, then on to 20, then 25. Quizzical looks crossed our faces as we exchanged glances. We were after all, engineers in training, and claimed no pretense to knowledge of the fancy science of probabilities. Intuition told us however that this was already very unusual. As the count touched 30, we were certain this had to be a unique occurrence, an instance of that oft quoted probability term, the long tail event, or statistical outlier.
There was no letup though. Picking up momentum, the names now came in a swell tide. In no time we were up from 30 to 50. Imagine fifty folks with the same birthday! Then 75, and rapidly on to 100! We were wide-eyed in disbelief. A century count of people with the same birthday in the same workplace! Something remarkable had to be going on.
Being in Mumbai, the plant personnel were of mostly Marathi origin, reflecting the predominant lingua franca of the workplace. Shinde and Munde. Bhonsle and Bhongale. The names continued to dance and roll. Dongre and Khopade. My knowledge of Marathi surnames was gaining ground rapidly, enough, I thought, to create a companion volume to Maneka Gandhi’s famous book of names. There was the odd South Indian Rao or Shenoy, and a lone Mishra, but it was primarily a sustained cascade of Marathi names. I could as well have been reading off the telephone directory.
The birthday roll now picked up further momentum, even as the departmental manager began to chuckle at our incredulous expressions. It breached 120, breezing through 130, and soon sailed past 150. The tally marks in our slim notepads now overflowed into multiple pages. Cricketing analogies kicked in. This was the kind of blitzkrieg score many Indian cricket batsmen would have loved to put up against Caribbean pace bowling, in contrast to their usual single digit exploits.
The count continued merrily, barreling past 160 and 175, then entered the 180’s. We were in sight of a double century! Then the last name rolled in, topping the birthday boy count at a magnificent 188. Fittingly, this matched the crowning score of Sunil Gavaskar, the Mumbai cricketing legend, in his swansong innings against the MCC at Lord’s a couple of summers earlier. In our minds, this rare shower of birthdays felt like having just witnessed the usually staid Gavaskar pulling out all the stops for a breathtaking innings.
The bearded department chief, seated across the room from us, was clearly tickled seeing our puzzlement at this enormous birthday coincidence. Allowing no further musing though, he bade us goodbye, and we decamped from his room, wandering into the plant’s long alleyways, searching for explanations.
Our hormonal brains quickly converged on a theory, working backwards nine months from 1st of June, to 1st of September. One of the bright sparks in the group ventured that 1st of September would have been some sort of collective action day, for synchronized festivities under the sheets all those years ago. Perhaps it was a mini (and literal) forerunner to the Summer of Love. It might have been a novel form of mass protest against a government family planning diktat or some such stupid socialist scheme of those days. Or perhaps, to take thumping advantage of new baby subsidies which may have been abruptly announced as being withdrawn after 1st June of the next year! Whatever the trigger, we were pretty sure it had to have been one long and sultry September night of flat out ardor and love making.
The question however remained as to why all the resulting babies would then come to converge on Bharat Petroleum as their workplace. That was still a big puzzle. Our 1st of September lovefest theory, colorful in its beginnings, only flattered to deceive.
During our leisurely corporate lunchbreak, we then came upon the most obvious hypothesis, which while not as fancy in imagination, certainly appealed to our college mindset of tinkering with the system for everything. The cut-off date for school admissions all those years ago would have been 1st of June. Harried parents who were keen to get little brats off to school (and off their backs), would have, in keeping with the typical Indian enthusiasm for early schooling, brought forward several July, possibly even a few August and later birthdays to 1st of June. That would have given the kids a strategic head start to schooling, having several of them begin a year ahead of normal. These official records, tinkered as they were at the very beginning, would have persisted all the way through into later life.
The staff canteen in the plant had a birthday treat item on its menu. One way to verify this new hypothesis was to find out if there was a spike in the number of people ordering birthday treat items that day. And sure enough, when we checked in the afternoon, it was only the normal count, no different from any other day. Our second theory stood handsomely vindicated!
In India, therefore, especially for those born around different academic year cutoffs, birthdays can be a triply nuanced phenomenon. You have not just the English birthday and the star birthday, but quite likely a separate official birthday as well. You might also find the official birthday to be the same for a large number of folks in your workplace, a mass (and essentially fake) phenomenon! Call it madness, or practical ingenuity, we sure can confuse the heck out of the rest of the world, even with something as basic as birthdays. Even for the old guard who might prefer to avoid big bashes, one can make up by celebrating this big day with triple fervor every year!