PRESENT IMPERFECT. Aunty, my return gift?

Of all the terrible things about parenting, the birthday party is the worst. It is pointless consumerism masquerading as love for a child. I should know, having spent the last couple of weeks trying to figure out a birthday party for a nine-year-old, which will communicate to her that I love her, but this is bullshit.

The sheer number of things involved in throwing a birthday party now is astounding. From the vomit-worthy ‘decorations’ (balloons gender coded to blue and pink) to the cake, which should have three-dimensional objects made of sugar and marzipan, all the way to the return gifts, the birthday party signifies everything that is wrong with the world today. The kids are veterans of this exercise by the time they are five or six, having attended a million of them, and are either too competitive or too jaded to enjoy it.

Yet, it is a parental competitive sport. A recent newspaper article quoted a party planner in Gurgaon saying that the budget for kids’ parties she handles is upwards of ₹1 lakh. If I gawked at it, it was only because it seemed too low. Even the apology of a party that I grudgingly put together for a dozen kids has cost about a fifth of that. Throw in a magician, a bouncy castle or a swimming pool, a tattoo guy, a puppeteer and a pony, and watch the ticker rapidly climb to the six-figure mark.

Yet, year after year, parents engage in this exercise of outdoing one another, which really at its core, has nothing to do with the child at all. It's merely a farce about parents proving to other parents how perfect they are. “Here’s me — vice president of Something Incorporated, who also baked this cake with sugar figurines that actually look like Mowgli and Bagheera.” Or “at work I might be the CEO and MD, but I am man enough to put together a piñata for my son’s birthday.” The kids themselves — raised to appreciate the expensive over the cheap and not much else — probably pause for a second and consider their good fortune before moving on to finding faults and demanding something more. Often, of course, these ₹1 lakh-plus birthday parties are for kids who are turning one or two, who either wail or sleep through these generous declarations of their parents’ affections.

Even parents who are otherwise normal get swept up in this birthday craze. At least four kids I know had two birthday parties the same year, because it was more manageable to invite two lots of 25 kids than one lot of 50. Kids have come back with iPod shuffles as return gifts. Ten-year-olds have birthday parties in beauty salons where they ‘treat’ themselves to manicures and pedicures. Parents hire villas and farmhouses for the event. There are wig makers and nail artists, jugglers and DJs, horses and elephants. And the kids themselves are never kids; they are ‘rockstars’ or ‘princesses’. It’s insane, this desire to give the kid the ‘best of everything’, and the insanity is spiralling out of control.

Clinging to my philosophy that a birthday, more than anything else, is the most common thing in the world — in fact it is the only thing that everyone has — I managed to hold off a party till my kid turned five. And this year, I’ve categorically stated, it’ll be the last ‘organised’ event. Perhaps, part of my resentment about these events is because I’m not very good with them. Nothing about my parties are perfect — there are too few balloons or too many of them, the cake melts, candles go missing and there is always a last-minute scramble to find the camera so that ‘the special day’ is recorded for posterity. And inevitably, at these parties, someone cries, someone fights, someone pushes, someone pukes and something breaks. Just around the time I am so frazzled that I sneak to a quiet a place and sip something strong, a kid sidles up, like a postman at Diwali, triggering the most maddening part of the party. The return gifts. Kids demand it like it’s their right. Nothing sets my blood afire like the question, “Aunty, where’s my return gift?” The kid has to be paid off for showing up at the party? If ever there is a sign that we are setting up our kids to be corrupt, this is it.

Despite these misgivings and many not-so-subtle attempts at instituting a ‘no gifts, no return gifts’ policy, I haven’t been successful in giving up the party entirely. I’d resolve to every year, but then I’d drop her off at a friend’s party — and be greeted by a life-size Powerpuff girl, or read elaborate instructions asking kids to bring swimwear and inflatable toys in the invitations — and resign myself to the fact that it is perhaps not right to deny her the joy of a birthday party altogether. And so I put my politics aside, get in the game, and call the balloonwallah and the baker.

After the last game has been played and all the guests have trooped out, I sit down and quietly look around the place. It’s a grand picture of waste. Wasted food, wasted paper, wasted plastic, wasted rubber, wasted return gifts abandoned for being not cool enough and wasted gifts piled into two categories — boring and already have this. The stuff could (and eventually will) fill a landfill. There is no lesson to be learned from a birthday party such as this, except a shuddering realisation of China’s manufacturing prowess.

(Veena Venugopal is editor BLink and author of The Mother-in-Law . Follow her on Twitter >@veenavenugopal )