Birth-cum-death day!

How many of you have got these wishes from you elderly on your birthday: “May God bless you”, “may you live long”, “may almighty be with you”, “may joy always cherish your life”, “may you get a bright future ahead”, etc? I am sure that, every individual would have received at least one of these, but how many of you have received something like this – “may you die on your birthday”?

I am not kidding! The Chassidic masters explain that the day “we all were born and were entrusted with a goal to achieve”`. The righteous person lives his life achieving his fullest potential and completes his mission on earth in the most perfect way possible. This perfection is expressed in the fact that his mission ends on the same day that it was begun.

Let’s talk about birthdays first!

1. August is the most common birthday month and February is the least common.
2. October 5^th is the most common birth date. Want to know why? Because it comes 9 months after New Year’s Eve.
3. May 22^nd is the most uncommon birth date as similar to the least popular date of February 29^th.
4. How much money do you spend on your birthday? 2000 bucks? 2500 bucks? Most money spent on a birthday party was 2, 72, 00,000 bucks that too in USD. That’s right!  $27.2 million (Rs. 1, 66, 57, 28,000)! This extravagant party was for the Sultan of Brunei’s 50th birthday in 1996.
5. Birthday Paradox– In a group of 23 (twenty-three) people, there is a 50% probability or chance that two of them will have the same birthday. That probability goes up to 99% for a group of 57 people. (Source: www.Wikipedia.org)
6. 6.     15 million people celebrate their birthday every day.

Now we’ll be talking about birth-cum-death days!

1. The researchers found that 13.8% more deaths occurred on an individual’s birthday.
2. The increased risk in men (14%) was similar to women (13.6%). When the results were analyzed according to their age, the higher rate of deaths on birthdays occurred in men and women aged 60 or above (whose increased risk ranged between 11% and 18%).
3. Heart attacks and strokes are up by 18.6% and 21.5% on birthdays, respectively. Further, even suicides are 34.9% more probable to occur on a birthday, and falls are a whopping 44% more common on cake day.

These facts sound crazy and weird though it certainly is, and naturally, there’s the question of “why?” According to psychology professor Richard Wiseman, from the University of Hertfordshire, there are two main lines of thought on the study.

“There are two camps – one is the camp that suggests you eat too much and you are getting on a bit and which causes you to die. The other one is called a placebo effect. You are knife-edged on death. And you kept yourself going until your birthday. You think ‘that’s it I’ve had enough I’m out of here’.”

So, next time you celebrate your birthday, I mean birth-cum-death day, make sure you live on that day else, you yourself will get confused that whether your relatives and parents should celebrate your birthday or death day or both after you die!

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