Giftically Challenged

There is that phase in life when youre old enough that youre working and have finished all possible avenues of education & qualified enough to be Eligible for Marriage (EfM), which ideally means youre around 25 - 26 and earning comfortably & you have a nice rosy career charted out for yourself. No worries in life either you might think. True, except for cases when a friend is getting married and you and your guy friends have to go for the wedding with a gift. For the record, I think it would be safe to say that on behalf of all Indian men - 'We dont really enjoy (but we pretend to) or understand (but we again pretend to) shopping, we dont know that it is that makes women walk all around a store & eventually pick up the 1st item they saw'. Throw in wedding shopping and EfM guys and its a case of the blind leading the blind. I even coined a term for it - Giftically Challenged.

On the face of it, it shouldnt be that bad. Buy something that they will use in the house, my parents told me. Fair enough. First option - bed sheets and pillow cases. But we had no idea if they would have already got those for themselves and if our gift would become redundant. What if we bought ones that didnt match the colour of the walls or the overall colour theme of the house. Besides what do 25 year old guys know about buying bed sheets anyway. And so bed sheets get the boot.

Next up - cutlery. Some of my relatives still use dinner sets that they got for their wedding decades ago, for home use today. Which is nice except for the fact that we were worried about what would happen if our potential gift was the n-th cutlery set that was gifted to them. I mean, how many forks and knives will 2 people use ? Incidentally, today my dad was telling me how for his wedding, they got 8 meat choppers (which was the in-thing in those days) as gifts ! Point proved.

Rapidly running out of options, we hit upon the idea of a wall clock. We found a few good looking ones but again the whole will it match the walls problem came up. Fortunately we managed to find an exquisite clock which had a misty glass base which could therefore go well on any background anywhere and picked it up. So one would think that things are back to normal which is right only to an extent cause come to think of it, all of us who picked up the gift are all EfM. And now that a clock has been bought, thats off the possibility list. I guess when my turn eventually comes, maybe I'll have to get used to eating with one set of forks & spoons for breakfast, a different set for lunch and a different one for dinner. And rotate between different sets of 3 everyday. Or maybe I'll have to change the colour of the walls of the different rooms in my home according to the bedsheets, cushions, lamp shades, curtains and what not that I might get. I think a P.S - 'No gifts please !' on the invite would make more sense.