Birthday Boy

This is how birthdays are normally celebrated, as your parents taught: Print invitations for all your friends and send them out, arrange for cake, food and drinks. Friends trickle in with presents, and you happily cut the cake while friends and family sing happy birthday.

This is the case here, in WKIPHB: When the clock strikes 12 (00 00hrs), the kid is dragged out of his room, ink, eggs, coffee, tea, cool drinks, soapy water, etc are poured on him. four people carry him by his limbs while others take turns in kicking his bum. This is called birthday-bums. Cake is cut, food and cooldrinks on the kid, everybody disperse happily. See? that is not so bad.

In addition, this kid's birthday was celebrated thus by these people who are supposed to be his friends: in addition to the above procedure, neem oil was procured specially for him. If you didn't know, neem oil is the stinkiest vegetable/plant oil extract out there. Women in rural South of Tamil Nadu use neem oil everyday. When you are unfortunate enough to be in a bus there, your olfactory senses will be overwhelmed by this smell, over and above the smell of karuvaadu, kozhi or suruttu/beedi (sun-dried fish, chicken or cigar/bidi.)

After fierce resistance, the neem oil was wasted on the ground. But a few drops still were upon him. when he playfully smeared the cake leftover, some oil accidently went into the mouths of the senior guys. A few of them became furious and wanted to take revenge upon whoever bought that bloody oil.

One instance: dirty chappal was immersed in water and poured on the chief instigator.
Other instances: detergent, shaving cream, liquid soap, etc were mixed in water and poured on the other guys.

In a Well Known Engineering College in India close to a race-track, this happens, among some circles: There are water tanks in bathrooms for filling up with water to be used in the toilets. An hour or so before midnight, the tank is filled to the brim with water, mixed with a generous amount of fountain pen ink, eggs and whatever liquid they could lay their hands on, and (hold your breath), that yellow coloured liquid that you do naturally (when someone does it when sleeping, it is called bedwetting). The kid is then dunked inside the tank, and his bum plastered.

Some of my college friends might disagree with this, but they were all decent guys and might not have seen this part. I have seen, my seniors, my super seniors have talked about it. even my uncle, who lived in the same cell err, hostel block as I did and his friends have said the same stories. Even my juniors 2 years younger told the same story. It is like a tradition. My birthdays were never celebrated in the hostels.

Can you corrolate with this?