kalote diaries-Interview Pooja bhatt

One rarely comes across an adult who likes the idea of getting older. To stand up and celebrate your progressing age in a culture that idealises youth is nerve-wrecking for most.

As children and young adults, most of us celebrate our birthdays joyously like some sort of personal fiesta.

But as we get older, we can hear the clock ticking, whispering the beginning of the end, and the big day for most is best forgotten.

Today is my 35th birthday. A day on which I'm officially halfway through my life… if I'm lucky that is! And on this monumental day, it's not thrill or fear that infuses me, but calm and nothingness that greets me and then stays to chat like an old friend.

I guess I've grown up in more ways than one because I understand more than ever, that eventually this day called 'my birthday' is just another day and I'm just another person.

Of birthdays

Historians believe that birthday celebrations date back to the invention of the calendar in 4000 BC, when it became possible to first keep track of time, and as a result, a person's age.

To begin with, just kings and other aristocracy celebrated birthdays simply because they were the only ones with records to keep track of their births.
Today, the song Happy Birthday, composed by an ordinary schoolteacher as a 'good morning' song, earns millions of pounds in royalty each year.

Eight-year-olds who only wear designer clothes have do's in lounge bars, while loads of jaded 25-year-olds feel 'old'.

Fearing the day

In pagan cultures, individuals often feared their birthdays because they believed that they were more likely to encounter evil spirits when they experienced a change in their daily lives.

As a result, family and friends surrounded the person of honour on his or her birthday with laughter and joy in order to protect him or her from such evil entities. Today, ironically, you will probably need to rely on the evil spirits themselves to protect you from most of your family and so-called friends!

Day of reckoning

The whole business is exhausting, and celebrations are truly overrated. Christmas is no longer about saying a prayer and lighting a candle, Holi is a hazard for the majority of women.

Diwali is a way to ensure that sound pollution hits a new high, not to mention the noxious fumes it leaves behind in its wake. Weddings have become obscene, ostentatious displays of dubiously accumulated wealth.

And birthdays? They've become a sort of a day of reckoning, the day to go on a diet, to quit smoking, to hear the grim bell tolling in the distance for thee. Let's face it: we're not talking about birth here. The subject is death, because in the best of cases, you're more than halfway there.

Changing ways

My childhood sense of birthdays and my grown-up one is now dramatically different. 'Yay! Let's open the presents!' has turned to 'Could everybody just go away and leave me alone? PLEASE?'

So this year, I will celebrate my birthday in a way birthdays are meant to be: quietly, graciously and without fuss. With my husband and our dogs, under a luminous sky, charting courses of satellites and thanking the Lord for the privilege of being truly alive.