Things That Should Not Be Given As Gifts

I buy the worst gifts in the world. Well...not in the world but among all the people I know, have heard or seen in my life. And actually I am the second in the line of buying the worst gifts. Want to know who's number one? Read on.

For years I have bought same thing for my sister. I always gifted her nail-paint. That too in shade of red. Always. Whenever I used to go shopping for her birthday, I somehow always used to end up picking red nail-paint. Now I am wiser. I don't gift her anything anymore.

Once I gifted my cousin a mouth organ. What the hell was I thinking? He couldn't even whistle. I don't think he can whistle now either. But a mouth organ? I just went into a shop. Mouth organ was the first thing I saw. Bought it. Gift wrapped it. Presented it.

One of the most recent incident was really embarrassing. It was Diwali. And Bhau-beej. Someone had this great idea about family get-together. Now the Pangaonkar clan is beyond counting, but even our small close family gathering could mean dozens and dozens of people. It was a special occasion. So it was pretty overwhelming. I counted and as it turned out that there were going to be some 12-13 sisters expecting gifts from us(That means me and other unfortunate brothers). Personally I think that Raksha Bandhan and Bhau-Beej are both some kind of conspiracies. It's a bloody extortion. And we have to feel happy about it.
Now I was broke and low on budget as always. Besides it's girls we are talking about. I had to buy same thing for everyone. I finally found some real nice turkish hankies packed in an even nicer plastic bags, which by the way I suspect cost more than the hankies itself. It took me nearly 3-4 hours to gift wrap all of them. Because the process of gift wrapping has many sub processes like buying a wrapping paper, cutting the paper, wrapping the gift, finding that the paper size was small and you had to use lot of tape to hold it together, unwrapping the gift, cutting the paper again in right size, then again wrapping the gift, running out of wrapping paper, running to store to buy more paper and just because I am going then buying 1 kilo of potato and onion and other things, then finally having the finished product. Anyways. Then the big day arrived. As I was handing out the gifts, I could see the excitement on their faces. After opening the gifts, excitement was replaced by disappointment. But I chose not to see that. Now one really cute cousin of mine exclaimed that I gave her socks as a gift. She did not stop at that though. She went on telling everybody present there that I was giving socks as present. By the way has anyone noticed that cuter the kid, the more devil he/she is? She even nicknamed me as socks bhaiyya. That's probably the worst nickname I ever had. And I have had some nasty nicknames. Next time I visit her, I am buying her a dozen pairs of different kinds of socks and then explain to her the difference between a hankie and a sock.

I am always at the giving end of the bad gifts. To be on the receiving end is no less embarrassing. It was few years back. My college friends gave me some gifts for my birthday. A useless movie audio cassette that I never listened. A greeting card which was surprisingly good and I really liked it. I had it with me for many years. The last gift was a pack of condoms. Now why would they give me condoms? I kept thinking for a minute. Was there some kind of hidden meaning to it? Some kind of metaphorical gesture? Then I thought nah. These are MY friends. A complete absence of deep thinking and an awesome amount of shallow behavior was the basis of our friendship. A friendship that is still going strong thanks to that solid foundation which till date is intact. They just gave me that as a prank. Now they were expecting party from me. I opened the pack and handed them one condom each. When I ran out of stock, I went to nearby medical shop and bought more for remaining friends. As it turned out my dear friends had bought my gift from the same shop. A medical shop with large stock of condoms near a college. Now that's a gesture. After giving them the return gifts, I told them to do something which I can not write here. I bested my friends. I emerged victorious. But my happiness lasted for only one year.

On my next birthday, they gifted me a diaphragm.