Celebrating Special Days
Best wishes to those whose birthday is today. No doubt friends and family treat you as a special person on this day. For those who revel in wider solidarities, note that it is also a special day for (statistically) about 22 million persons around the globe; others, who need to be brought down a notch, might be reminded that their “special” category is shared by so many others.
Celebrations on birthdays and anniversaries, as for festivals, has long been the norm. Given the size and diversity of India, there are dozens of festivals that crowd our calendar, all celebrated with gusto – be it Diwali, Christmas, Eid, or New Year’s Day. While everyone enjoys the fun, food, and finery, the biggest beneficiaries are the “sellers”. Enjoyment of the festival may bring a smile to your lips, but the bigger laugh (all the way to the bank) emanates from the shopkeeper. Increasingly, commerce conquers camaraderie on these special days.
The numerous traditional festivals, one would think, are enough to keep shops, restaurants and holiday resorts happy. Yet, like all good businesses – and rather like Dicken’s Oliver – they always want more. So, despite the growing scale of individual celebrations on birthdays, anniversaries, and weddings, new ones are being promoted: “destination” weddings, engagement parties, multi-day wedding events, even pre-marriage and post-marriage do’s. In shows of one-upmanship and competitive ostentation, these are getting ever larger and more lavish. Doubtless, clever marketeers are busily – and successful – promoting this from behind the scenes.
The rapid growth of such high-spend celebrations has not resulted in complacency. In keeping with the Gordon Gekko dictum that “Greed….is good” (from the movie Wall Street), business has sought to create more avenues for profits that ride on celebrations. Since a birthday or anniversary come but once a year, and weddings less frequently than that (even in the case of much-married Elizabeth Taylor!), smart businesspersons have innovatively created more special days.
Some of these, like Valentine’s Day, have been celebrated for long but have attained greater visibility and scale in India more recently. The competing Cow Hug Day has not quite taken off, possibly because the commercial dimensions are minimal: after all, buying flowers or gifts for a cow may not quite work. There are also Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Women’s Day, Children’s Day, and Daughter’s Day – all promoting the buying of gifts and probably a restaurant meal.
There are also other special days, their popularity seemingly constrained by the limited commercial scope. Examples include Pi Day, initiated in 1988, and sanctified in 2009 by the US Congress proclaiming March 14 as National Pi Day. The date (3/14, in the US format) is the first three digits of pi. For those using the (more logical) date-month-year format, 22 July - written as 22/7 – is Pi Approximation Day. There are also the World Environment Day and the Oral Health Day. All these have limited commercial scope (unless Pi is made Pie), though the two-page Oral Health ad may have helped the advertiser to sell more toothbrushes or to create brand salience.
For greater commerce, there is the more recent World Biryani Day – the country’s most popular ordered-in dish. Now, we need a Chicken Tikka Masala Day and a Gobi Manchurian Day – to boost revenues and to pre-empt UK and China.
The author loves to think in tongue-in-cheek ways, with no maliciousness or offence intended. At other times, he is a public policy analyst and author. Among his books is Decisive Decade: India 2030 Gazelle or Hippo (Rupa, 2021).
