Kitty parties..

This post is based on Usha Suryamani’s post on similar lines and a recent office get together we had.
Offices or rather IT & ITES offices(I know of) have the funda of celebrating the birthday’s of their team members. It’s considered to be a MNC culture to celebrate the employees birthdays!! I think this attitude is fastly getting down these days even to our Indian public sector banks, government offices…

A typical IT office team get-together.

Entire team would assemble in a training rooms(ironical -for birthday celebrations!) and one of the birthday bakkaras of the month would cut the cake on everyone’s behalf! Followed by, a cake & snack distribution ceremony by few ladies (or rather responsible aunties) of the team.

It’s followed by a gift voucher distribution from the manager to the birthday babies(that’s how they are called!) of the month. The gift vouchers would be from leading shopping or chain stores in the city! The birthday babies will collect the vouchers as a present! (The voucher has come from their pockets?!)

They will need to allocate time to go and redeem the voucher in the stipulated stores irrespective of whether they want to buy something or not! Otherwise the voucher will expire!! They would eventually end up spending more than the voucher amount!

It’s considered fun to have high calorie food at office get-togethers as its celebration of your department member’s birthday party!!

If we consider the average money collected per person per month is around 100Rs. So, for a team of around 30 members, the money would come to app around 40K per year!

If we extrapolate the same to the entire organization – Would it not be sufficient to educate few kids or provide for feeding for an orphanage for a few days?

During the initial few years in office, we did have a similar type arrangement within few of our closed friends! As it’s considered a collective gift, we would all meet up on a weekend. We would go to most expensive designer wear saree shops in Chennai and buy clothes for our respective birthdays! Down the line, one of our friends enlightened us that this practice is a sheer waste of money and we stopped this practise for the good!