When birthday wishes turn into demands

Of course birthday entitlement is a thing. It is a sign of healthy self-esteem to feel important and expect things—for loved ones to pull out cakes at midnight, and flowers at breakfast, for friends to drop by with wine and presents, for your social media to flood with wishes, even for the universe to dish out fine weather and rainbows as nods of special recognition that you are a favoured child.

And, sometimes, birthdays do deliver mightily. Who can forget Sachin Tendulkar’s 25th—when he blew away a much-favoured Australian squad like so many birthday candles, scoring 134 off 131 balls, including 12 fours and three towering sixes, to win the final of the Coca-Cola desert storm tournament for India?

But then again, sometimes they don’t—just look at Australia’s Mitchell Marsh, who hoped to celebrate his 30th birthday during a warm-up match ahead of the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup with a glittering performance and got handed a brutal reality check by the universe instead—having to walk straight back to the dugout in complete silence after being dismissed on the very first ball he faced.

And sometimes, they really do you in. William Shakespeare, for example, died on his 52nd—after meeting up with his fellow writers for a marathon birthday booze-up. Allegedly he drank far too much, caught a severe fever, and passed away that night itself.

So, naturally, birthday blues are a thing, too—people ask themselves existential questions, feel loneliness and self-pity, get tortured by unmet, self-set deadlines (I should have bought a house by now, I should have made senior management by now), or feel hollow and exhausted by having to perform joy while feeling none within.

Which is why, as functioning adults, it is important to grasp that a birthday—while not a bad day to take stock, to give thanks, and to pat yourself on the back for making it thus far, is simply a number and not an excuse for you to turn into a mini-dictator.

But, what about non-functioning adults? Or gigantic manchilds? What can one even say to the fact that Donald Trump has such a bloated sense of birthday entitlement that he expects entire nations and conglomerates of nations to wrap up a whole geopolitical war, secure it with a neat red bow, and lay it down at the Oval Office desk in the form of a historic peace deal as a present to him for simply surviving another 365 days around the sun.

How detached does one have to be to expect that Iran will sign a hasty, legacy-padding treaty just because it’s DJT’s HBD? How grotesque is it for an octogenarian, accused of taking decisions that have contributed to the death of children, to act so childishly?

In Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Total Perspective Vortex is a brutal torture mechanism designed to obliterate a victim’s mind by showing him/her the entire infinite universe and their own infinitesimally tiny, insignificant place within it. I seriously feel Trump may be the only human alive to emerge from the vortex utterly unperturbed.

Meanwhile, Tehran has its eyes set on another date. Their state media announced that the elaborate public funeral of late supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will begin on July 4—US’s independence day. Quite a savvy co-opt. And with their hardliners in no mood to budge on any of their demands, time for the birthday nation to hand out some solid return gifts.

editor@theweek.in