It’s your birthday. When you enter the room and your guests leap out from every corner, shrieking, “Surprise!” it’s highly unlikely that you really are surprised.
Ask any youngster about birthday plans they’ve lined up for their special day and chances are you’ll get a reply like, “I think I’m going to get a surprise party from my friends or family, because I’m sure something’s cooking!”
Well, with such bashes becoming the order of the day, the real surprise will be when someone doesn’t get a surprise bash. Kanika Jain, a program analyst with an IT company, agrees that surprise parties aren’t really a surprise but an ‘unspoken norm’ these days.
“Two weeks ago, while we were out at dinner, my husband told me about the surprise party that he was planning for me on my birthday and that he’d invited all our friends. He actually went so far as to ask me to help him with some details of the so-called ‘surprise party’ as he had got caught up in an important project and couldn’t call off the party as the invitations had been sent,” she adds.
Even celebrities agree that surprise bashes are losing their charm. Singer Tanvi Shah says, “It’s weird because most of the time you know about it and then you start having expectations from it. But when surprise parties are done truly secretly for a person who likes such things, it’s worth it. I still remember on my 18th birthday, family and friends surprised me. I was so touched because it was a surprise in every sense of the word for me.”