Keep your gift and let me home

For several years, we lived next door to a family that owned close to 20 cows. The main source of income for the household came from the milk they sold to people in the neighborhood. They had all kinds of cows – desi ones, big ones, small calves, two headed cows, and there was even one from Germany that flew into Bangalore in 1994 for a princely sum of Rs 45,000. It gave so much milk; the other cows developed a complex after a while. They made wonderful neighbors, and were the typical courteous family that you like to have around. They bought sweets on festivals, and their kids were taught to share crackers with me during Diwali. They had many kids running around the house, for there’s had been a joint establishment.

Anytime you have kids around at home, it’s a co-incidence that you have birthdays to celebrate. And anytime there are birthdays to celebrate, there are other kids to be invited. And anytime kids are invited, parents send their tots with a nicely wrapped gift to be handed over. My aunt was visiting us one evening, and as it turned out it was also one my neighbor’s kid’s birthday. I got the invite to attend the celebration just an hour prior to the actual candle blowing ceremony. And boy was I excited!

There was one issue, however. It was too late to go out and buy presents that I could take. So, my Aunt suggested that I should dig into my own unused stationery stock, make a nice little packet out of it and take it for the kid who was turning 5 or something. Probably re-gifting is not quite the norm with people in their 20s today, but ask anyone 45 or more, and they don’t seem to think it’s bizarre at all. I must have taken with me to the birthday party an imported pencil, a foreign eraser shaped like a light bulb, a stationery box and few more odds and ends as the present.

After the cake was cut and the fun was had, I gifted the little boy what I had got for him. He opened it right in front of me, with his mother standing there looking on. They must have expected to find something outrageous, I guess. But when the kid opened and found some cool looking stationery in it, he was happy. I think you could upgrade that to ‘ecstatic’. His mother assumed I was more grown-up in the head than I actually was, and so she tested me with the line “Oh, why did you bring all this expensive stuff?”

This was my moment to be the big man. It had finally arrived. Without as much as batting an eyelid, I said, “Not a problem, Aunty. All this stuff was at home, and so I decided to get it. No trouble at all.”

I learnt my lesson with gifts that day. I understood that you can never gift that ‘perfect gift’ to anyone. You just can’t. Maybe it’ll be too big for them, maybe it’s too small, maybe it’s the wrong time, maybe they’ll think you’re plain cheap; or maybe, they’ll think you’re just showing off. But whatever it is, they’ll never suspect that you’re re-gifting it. I’m convinced about it. When I get a gift, I might think what a cheapskate the person is, but I would never be inclined to think that he or she is just re-gifting the stuff. That would be the last thought in my head. Maybe this person would re-gift their things to others, but come on; to me? No way.

Then somebody came up with the idea of gift coupons. I once got gifted a voucher for five hundred bucks at a music store. I thought to myself, “The world needs more people like her. By giving me this coupon she’s telling a couple of things at the same time. One, she’s saying, here’s my budget for you. Now go do what you want with it. Two, I don’t really want to waste my time thinking about what you might like, or ask my friends what his tastes are. So three, here’s the money; you go do the shopping for yourself.” I loved this idea. I mean thank goodness I got a gift coupon from this person. What if she had given me something scary instead? Maybe like a horror movie DVD or something. Yuck, I don’t even watch horror stuff.

So off I went to music store and bought a couple of Steven Segal movies, Dirty Dancing and one or two other DVDs. When I looked at the bill total, it was fifty bucks more than the coupon amount of five hundred. I had two choices here: pay the extra fifty or keep back one of the DVDs. I thought about it for a while. Paying the extra money just didn’t seem right. It was a gift after all, and no one pays for a gift. But option two pissed me off even more. By keeping back one of the DVDs, the shop got to keep 50 bucks with them, because the total was now 450. That just didn’t seem fair. So I sprayed chilly powder into the cashier’s eyes and ran out of the door with all the DVDs. “Take that, you suckers.” I said to myself as I ran down the walkway to the store.

Gift coupons in stores are like the casino. The house always wins.