Manu Joseph: Gifting isn’t really the noble act it seems to be

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. One evening, a few days before Diwali, it took me nearly three hours to travel 30km from Gurgaon to Delhi. The traffic congestion was, as usual, caused by amiable people who cannot bear to be alone.

Many of them were travelling to hand over gifts to other people. Some cars were piled with gifts and driven by unhappy drivers who would drop them off one by one. All around me, there were gifts going some place that would make people happy—nominal gifts, useless gifts, gifts bought in bulk, lots of sugar, surely, glassware and some silver here and there.

These were obligations inching along jammed streets. Gifting is not a noble act. Or at least not as noble or simple as it appears.

It is a force exerted by society to make individuals participate in herd activity. A collective, any collective, is always contemptuous and fearful of the free individual; in response, it promotes rituals to strengthen bonds and fellowships. All festivals torment the solitary.

If nothing, at least in the form of a traffic jam. Inside the cars, I noticed most people were heroically patient. As if they were in the crush of a religious procession.

It was as though they knew this was not commuting, but the concourse of a festival that everyone was part of. Only the paid drivers were miserable, apart from a few people who did not think bonding with people was worth being stuck in a jam for hours. Here and there, a driver would leave the car to go urinate in full public view.

Gifting is an ancient code. And it is as it always was, something that occurs between peers, between equals. Exactly like envy.