We celebrate what we inherit, not what we achieve

So I got my second car in January this year, and it came with a whole thing. My wife put a lemon under the front tyre as I entered our apartment gate, along with a 'teeka' mark on the bonnet, and my mother, at home in Kolkata, worshipped, blessing me, and made sweets at home to celebrate.

And a few months later, we launched devices that took years and tireless revisions to build. We went for dinner at a place we usually go to after work. That was it.

Now I'm not complaining, because I didn't want anything. If someone had tried to organise something I'd have stopped them. Arre chhodo, kuch nahi hai. That's the part that's been bothering me, actually. That the reflex is mine.

Also, the car is an achievement too. I paid for it with about fifteen years of working. The brief congratulations I got had nothing to do with the fifteen years of work, but just the fact that there's a new car.

Anyway, the last year was busy for everyone around me. Three friends switched jobs. One got a global role. One pivoted after eighteen months of building the wrong thing, which is a much harder call than switching jobs and got discussed the least. And for each of these instances and life milestones, I devoted what, two minutes? Three? And in at least three cases what I said was, "party toh banta hai."

That's the best case, by the way. Someone quits a safe job to start a company and what they get is a demand for food.

Then a friend's sister got married. Eleven months of preparation. Four hundred people. A menu argument that ran three weeks. A WhatsApp group and a spreadsheet with tabs.

And it's not just weddings. For the smallest Lakshmi puja at home there's a correct day, a correct order, and an aunt with opinions about the flowers.

So I kept thinking, why. These are people who love their children. Everyone's proud of everyone. The pride isn't missing. So what is.

I think the first bit is just the calendar. Festivals arrive on their own. The date is fixed, the relatives remind you, the shops remind you harder by putting out decorations and SALE boards six weeks early. We don't make festivals happen. They happen to us.

An achievement has no date. No template, no aunt who knows the sequence. Someone has to invent the whole thing from nothing, usually at two days' notice, usually tired. So mostly nobody does. Fair enough.

But here's the thing about the dinner. Think about what's actually inside a puja. You know the date a year ahead, so there's this long run-up. Because there's time, everyone has some kaaj. Then the day comes and you're in different clothes, you've travelled, the house smells different. It happens again next year the same way. And every year somebody tells the story of the year the pandal flooded, so the flood is more real to you than last month.

The dinner has none of that. Two days' notice. One phone call. Same restaurant. Doesn't repeat. And nobody ever tells the story again.

So it's not that the dinner was too small. There was just nothing in it.

For a wedding, people fight to be included. Teri shaadi mein ni bulayega. There's a whole phrase for demanding your place at someone else's occasion and people use it half-joking and completely seriously at the same time. Nobody has ever said anything like that to me about a product launch.

And for an achievement the sentence is treat toh banti hai. Look at that one properly. The grammar has made your achievement into a debt. You did something good, so now you owe us lunch.

Which is the opposite of a wedding, where the family spends an obscene amount of money and gains status by spending it. Nobody says a wedding is showing off, even though display is the entire point. The money flows out and the respect flows in. With an achievement, you pay, and everyone else collects.

Then I realised the real problem. At a puja nobody is honouring themselves, you're honouring the deity. At a wedding, the couple doesn't praise themselves; the family does it for them, into a microphone, for longer than necessary.

For an achievement, there's nobody doing that. So you've got two choices. Pay the treat and be the debtor, or stand up, talk about your own work, and be the show-off. Both are horrible. So most of us pick neither, and the thing just goes away.

It's not that we're being humble. Nobody's job hai na. That's all it is.

And I'll be honest, part of this is also families protecting the kid who didn't get the promotion. A festival treats everyone the same. Celebrating one person says out loud that one person did something the others didn't. That's not a stupid thing to be careful about.

But something does get lost. Three years of work, two hours at a restaurant, never mentioned again. And I was raised the other way, where achievement was the thing that counted, and I'm not going to pretend that's solved either. I can't sit still on a Sunday. Never been able to.

So I want to try two things, and only two, because I know how these conversations end.

One, stop building new occasions and just take ten minutes inside Puja, when everyone is already in the same room anyway. Who made what this year. That's it.

Two, give someone the job of telling the story. Not praise, nobody wants praise. The story. Including the eighteen months of building the wrong thing. Because nobody has ever accused a story of showing off. That's the gap you can walk through.

It'll be excruciating the first couple of times. Fine. Every ritual that feels permanent now was somebody's awkward idea at a table once.

My mother knew exactly what to do for that car. The lemon, the chillies, the temple first, the sweets from the correct shop, without asking anybody. And I still don't know what you put under the tyre for three years of work.