Oh serial greeters, no more!! Aur nahin bus aur nahin

 

Let me first prime you a bit from my blog archives:

 

http://anindecisiveindian.blogspot.com/2022/06/oh-they-kill-with-kindness.html

 

http://anindecisiveindian.blogspot.com/2020/12/hbd-forsooth.html

 

You now know what to expect. And I too know exactly what is coming when my phone starts pinging with a fury that rivals the roar of Armageddon. I was already between a rock and a hard place when the blitz of World Coconut Day greetings seamlessly transitioned to a deluge of Teachers’ Day wishes. Oh, that blessed Friday the 6th at precisely 3:01 PM when it all began, and the torment continued unabated past Saturday the 7th, 5:37 PM. My phone, laptop, and PC were now gloriously cluttered with no less than 467 digital Lord Ganeshas in various mudras—each one looking more bemused and anguished than beatific. A song with beats from the underworld accompanied these blessed visuals, making the torment complete. Then, as if the gods were testing my resolve, they slipped in greetings for some strange thing called Hartalika Teej—because why not?

 

“Oh, that this too too solid flesh would melt...” cried the bard’s Hamlet in my head as I was besieged by well-rounded semi-literates wishing me a Happy World Literacy Day, followed by the well-meaning but misguided who exhorted me not to kick the bucket on World Suicide Prevention Day. Well, bless their souls. I would have called out the First Aid Day crew for teaching me how to kill an injured specimen on the spot before the actual killer, the doctor, could, but alas, my fury was directed elsewhere—at the vile International Chocolate Dayers. The irony! Mocking a diabetic with their beige, buff, and bister sweets. “What fresh hell is this?”—Shakespeare did not say it, but I will  bet he would if he were in my shoes.

 

You would think that was the worst of it. Oh, woe is me. As Ariel quoth, describing Ferdinand’s jump from the ship in The Tempest “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here”,  a new front opened: Hindi Diwas, where proud defenders of the language flooded me with sarcastic greetings, challenging my love for the language, blissfully unaware that their skull jelly and talk tubes do not differentiate between kachchha (कच्छा: underwear) and kaksha (कक्षा: class). Oh, the joy! But the final nail, the coup de grâce, came today. Engineers Day. Thousands of them—engineers, non-engineers, and every pompous soul in between—raining down wishes on me, while a beleaguered Happy Onam and the tepid International Day of Democracy drowned in the deluge.

 

This all happened on WhatsApp—occasionally on email or SMS, because apparently, no one picks up the phone anymore. Not one single actual call or, no surprise, a hard-copy card.

 

Oh, I am indignant like Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet shouting, “...A plague o’ both your houses!...” and I am murderous, truly murderous. One more greeting and I might just channel Macbeth and say, “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly...”

 

But I gradually made my peace with this new-age asininity. Until they invent an AI-based Greetings Blocker (feasible, right?), I am turning WhatsApp off. Those eager to wish me a Happy Eid Milad un-Nabi or those compulsive World Ozone Day types, you can call me—or forever hold your peace. I have bolted from the clutches of kindness.

 

But, like earlier, and I repeat, I will lurk while I disown all this kindness here today, I will continue to monitor these perpetrators of decorative clemency:

 

Banākar faqīroñ kā ham bhes Ghālib

tamāshā-e-ahl-e-karam dekhte haiñ 

(faqīroñ: dervishes, vagrants one who lead mystic life, bhes: disguise, tamāshā-e-ahl-e-karam: spectacle, exhibition of the people of kindness. I put on the guise of a vagrant mendicant and witnesses the spectacle of the conduct of the people of generosity. I do this not because I need of their generosity but with a view to determining the virtue in the so-called kind people; after all genuinely-generous people go through their kind deeds privately without a fanfare.)

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