Surprise!!!!!! - Take one!

The most difficult part of a birthday eve is the act of throwing fake surprise to your friends' un-Surprise Birthday party. Though a birthday party can happen only on the birthday eve and there is no surprise about it, everyone around you would expect you to be surprised when they bring the cake at the stroke of midnight to your room as a surprise. You will have to say all words like "Wow!", "You need not have done that", or "I never imagined this" and even "How do you guys know it is my birthday?????" even though you would have washed your face and are on your neat clothes so that the photos would look perfect. Witnessing this trend for many years from college days, it is always a difficult task for me to act surprised when all your friends live in the same room or house as you and hang out with you all the time. However as a true friend, you will never want others to appear stupid after all the hard work they put on creating the surprise. So I always take the trouble of making sure that I don’t hear any of their plans how much lame they would be sometimes to hide the cake in the refrigerator or make secret calls to the rest of the group in other Indian languages that they believe that I wont understand. What they really don’t understand is that we all obviously expect them to throw a party on the birthday and in what ever language they talk, the words "cake" and "birthday" are always voiced in English. So it is hard not to hear the obvious plans. But we still manage not to surprise our friends by acting surprised on not knowing about the surprise party.

One should understand how hard I have been trying not to be there when Srikanth, Naren, Anji and Vinayak are busy discussing about the party tonight. Whether it was when Naren calling Vinayak to inquire about me or when Anji came home to tell Srikanth that he is going to Bi-lo to get the cake or when he called Srikanth after getting the cake, the best I could do was to act very busy exploring the features of my new iPhone. The only surprise that is not open yet is the flavor of the cake. I bet it is chocolate mousse.