Reasons to Celebrate

A few blogposts back I had grumbled about our fetish for festivals and how I was definitely not such a fetishist. After reading my rant I quizzed myself:

“So if you are such a nose-in-the-air about chucking water balloons and dancing with sticks in your hand, what do you like to celebrate? Surely even a stick-in-the-mud like you can find a reason to pour out the bubbly?”

Days of deliberation later, I found to my relief that there have been occasions when I would have broken into joyous thumkas if I was not the repressed individual that I am. In chronological order:

When Sunny Gavaskar equaled and then surpassed Don Bradman’s record of test centuries I celebrated by making an ultra-heavy scrapbook with cute, dimpled pictures of Sunny and filled the book with captions such as “Sweety smiles sweetly”.

On my 18th birthday, my parents treated me to an appropriately posh dinner accompanied by a dignified glass of gimlet. My alcohol preferences went downhill thereafter.

When I broke up with a boyfriend and sealed the next deal with a kiss we celebrated by drinking a gallon of rum punch and dancing crazily to the unromantic “Walk of Life” by Dire Straits.

I left for Germany, all gung-ho to celebrate my independence and sunk into gloom after losing my luggage, meeting my ferocious landlady and trying to figure out the relentless and grim consonant-laden Deutsch in a snow-covered desolate town. After a few weeks when Germany became dear to me and kaffe and kuchen became a ritual, I celebrated by following the regional wine-festival calendar religiously. I have to say that some of those celebrations did not end well – sometimes with vomit in my backpack.

My husband and I celebrated our first home after marriage by shopping at Robinson’s in the Singapore Sale. Some things we bought at huge discounts – a bathmat, a saucepan, a wooden spoon, a rice-cooker. Most of these are still lurking around my house.

After six months of being a teetotaler as a result of hepatitis, Amsterdam’s canals and Amstel beer were unbeatable.

MBA graduation – I regaled all friends by doing the Bharatnatyam head-and-eye move to Alisha’s “Made in India” in a disco in Rotterdam. Ahem! That’s not too far from raising the much-maligned thumka. Moving on…

When the home-pregnancy-test kit showed up two lines, I celebrated with the first of a series of guilt-free dessert buffets.

When my newly born daughter came home, we celebrated by watching the new year fireworks fill up the South Bombay skyline.

Ten years of marriage culminated in the bowels of a Phuket lobster.

What would the next one be?