Lessons from the Christmas Party

The Christmas party is one event at which a Crescentian learns a lot. Like every other tradition, Crescent could have spoiled this one too, by placing the party two days before an exam. Unfortunately for them, Jesus was born on 25th December, and that cannot be changed!!

The main attribute to be explored is sharing. Not the sharing of views and opinions, but the sharing of food. The basic principle: students are divided into groups, and each group is assigned an eatable to bring from home. So on the morning of the party, instead of worrying about their clothes and their looks, every student is worried about whether the gulab jamuns will be ready in time!!

The first lesson is that there are no generalisations in life. Take that famous general statement, "All women are bad drivers". It is definitely not true, because some boys are bad drivers too.

Similarly, at the party you cannot just say, "Oh, the gulab jamuns are bad." You can't, because ten people brought a hundred jamuns from home, and once they are mixed, nobody can say which gulab jamun came from where.

Ironically, or maybe aptly, just as I was eating a bad jamun, a friend in our class was singing that old song about the river that meets the sea, and the sea that meets who-knows-what water, and nobody ever knowing which drop came from where.

I have seen people (not the Sixth Sense kind of people, normal people) wearing a "Happy Thoughts" tag on their collar or pocket. I bet the person who started that was a Crescentian.

At the Christmas party, after a few odd-tasting jamuns, a friendly investigation may finally reveal that the ladoos are good. So you approach them, take one in your hand, close your eyes in expectation of a mouth-watering treat, and just as the ladoo is about to touch your wide-open mouth… IT CRUMBLES. Yes, it does that. All that is left is a mess on your hand, on your clothes and on your mind.

And just as you are about to hurl some expletives, someone says, "Kisi ki maa ne bahut pyaar se banaye honge, isliye itne soft hue hain."Somebody's mother must have made them with a lot of love; that's why they are so soft.

Oh, maa… (I need to check whether Prasoon Joshi was a yellow Crescentian.)

Yet the most hilarious and the most educational part was the gifts. The tradition: each student brought a gift, all the gifts were mixed, and a lottery decided who got which.

The hilarious part was when eager students (mostly boys) got a gift from their Person of Interest (POI) and then used it as an excuse to approach that person: "What does this gift mean? I didn't understand it. Is it a game or what?" And a conversation was initiated.

I had a friend who took this to the extreme. He got a gift, a large bar of white chocolate, and he still went to ask, "What does this mean?"

Eat it!! That's what it means!!! Eat it and finish it, and if you are not going to eat it, give it to your friends!

Yet he had the gumption to approach the POI with his silly question. The idea was that since the chocolate had come to him from that person, God must be working in his mysterious ways to bring the two together. In a lottery, he got a chocolate as proof that God exists. (Guilty as charged. We are, after all, the generation of hopeless romantics who gave Karan Johar his first hit, and brought real suffering on millions of fellow Indians.)

Oh yes, and never mind the fact that the lottery was rigged to produce the desired outcome!!

But the even greater lesson was in game theory.

Yes, game theory, much discussed in the film A Beautiful Mind, in which John Nash wins the Nobel Prize for seeing imaginary people around him.

For the Crescentian, the Nash equilibrium problem was this:

It requires great thinking, and a good market study to understand which way the others are leaning, before making an informed decision. It is the biggest puzzle of their lives. It involves quiet opinion polls, and it is a game of poker: the person in front must not see your cards, but you must read theirs.

Some devious geniuses do crack it. You buy a gift worth ₹15, make it look like ₹30, get back a gift worth ₹25: a profit of ₹10. And you still get to show generosity over the "loss" of ₹5: "Arre, sab friends hi hain, thoda aage-peeche hua toh kya hua."Come on, we're all friends; so what if it's a little more or less?

And as usual, some go home happy because their gift came in at a profit, some unhappy because they made a loss, some happy because they got to talk to their POI (though the POI must have formed an opinion of him as a "dumb fellow"), and some just went through the motions.

Oh yes, while all this was going on, there were actually some Christian students (usually one or two) enjoying the party with their Hindu and Muslim classmates. Then there were the Sikhs too, the Marwaris, the Gujaratis, the Sindhis, the Mallus, sometimes Somalis, Africans… Europeans. (Oh yes, now I am definitely exaggerating.)

But that day we were all just a bunch of children, enjoying ourselves with our teachers, on a day when no homework was checked, no book was opened, no test was given and, most importantly, no marks were handed out. I bet on it: getting a bad gulab jamun is infinitely better than getting bad marks in your English paper.

Merry Christmas.