On Gifting

Happy New Year! I had another opening in mind, but acknowledging the fact that we have entered 2015, I would like to wish people reading this a very Happy New Year. May you get the results for all that you are working for this year. Have a great year ahead.

Turn of the year always brings with itself mixed feelings. For the time being, the most dominant of these feelings is the confusion regarding what to gift people. Now, gifting is one activity which I believe should take place irrespective of the occasion. The presence of the occasion merely gift wraps it in the pretext of reason. However, here’s where the irony lies. While I like gifting, it’s selecting one that gives me nightmares. Why so? Because I am on a budget. I like my gifts to be unique, to be talked about entities. But the green cover required to make that happen somehow remains elusive. Recently, I gifted a dear friend a video for her birthday. Sounds weird, but I transferred a video to her phone and there it was, a video-her birthday present. Now, this was no usual video downloaded from the internet. It was a compilation running up till about 25 minutes. A brief background: this particular friend is in my city and in the few years that she has lived, she has spent only a couple of years away from her home on her birthday. Now that she is in the initial stages of her professional career, living in another city on her birthday was making her sad and that sadness was swelling up inside her with each day running up till her birthday. I knew this situation might get worse, so about ten days before her birthday, I requested her sister to request her family members to send a video wishing her a happy birthday. On my part, I did the same by requesting her friends. All these clippings were compiled and what resulted was a video where her entire family and close friends wishing her. Now that was my birthday gift!!

What did I get in return? Her happiness in the form of her tears and laughter, and a wonderful dinner later in the day. Now, the next task for me is to make the next gift comparable in standards to this one. If you have any ideas, please feel free to share.

P.S. This post was written a while \back but it is only now that I have bought it to light over this platform