Don’t wish me a Happy Diwali, please.

On this auspicious day of “Diwali”, there’s this tradition of sharing happiness by getting in touch with people you know and wish them prosperity and well being in their lives.

So, this afternoon, I saw a glimpse of my Dad’s phone notification, and I saw something that caught my attention, a Whatsapp notification saying “179 unread messages from 143 chats”. I went over the messages superficially, and most of them were clearly broadcast messages, probably sent to 1000 other persons along with my Dad. I glanced at my phone to see what I’ve got; it was “17 messages from 10 chats”. Phew, that was manageable.

Out of curiosity, I wanted to see how my Dad is going to respond to these stack of wishes. The thing is, it just takes 5 minutes to send a broadcast message to hundreds of people, but it might take you hours to reply back to each of those wishes genuinely. And honestly, I feel that it’s unreasonable to spend hours on replying those people who merely spent 5 minutes to wish everyone they knew (and ironically, some of them won’t even know who all they wished). So.. what do one ends up doing? Create another broadcast message, and reply people back, Simple!

Okay, now what used to be the tradition of sharing happiness by human interaction, has now turned into a “mandatory” and “time saving” activity/formality for humans by the means of technology we use. Saving time is good activity though, but they are few things that are missing in today’s world:

• Personalized interaction: I remember a friend calling me up to wish Happy Diwali a couple of years ago, and I still remember he wished. But think about someone who gets hundreds of broadcast messages, your wishes would probably remain in the chat records, never making it to someone’s heart and spreading the actual happiness that it was intended to.
• Attention to genuine wishes: A few nice people that I know do actually spend time to wish persons one by one in the chats, but, these messages are lost in piles of messages that one receives. I’d be much happier if someone just said “Happy Diwali Satwik!” to me instead of sending me across a long copied and a perfectly crafted generic message that I might receive from 10 other persons as well. But again, if I’ve 143 messages waiting for me to scroll through, it becomes a tough job to identify and revert back to these awesome people.

Anyways, I’ve nothing against the “Wish all” culture because it might be necessary for you to wish thousands of clients you have, or your employees, or maybe you have other priorities which certainly require more attention. But what I’d like to convey is, please do spend some time to try to genuinely wish persons really important to you in your life through personalized interaction, which is far more effective in developing healthy relations and spreading real happiness (which is what the culture of wishing is all about!). And this probably goes beyond the wishing culture. People are so caught up in following the traditions that they forget to understand why actually they exist in the first place.

Well, those were just my opinions. And yeah, have a safe and Happy Diwali :p, cheers!