A birthday one two many!

Royal births, royal smiles!

Raju Korti
Now that the Duchess of Cambridge, Kate and her husband Prince William have heralded the arrival of a new royal scion, we must also thank them profusely for spawning -- albeit unwittingly -- an utterly predictable but platitudinous chain reaction.
You cannot but subjugate yourself to the pleasure of the most academic exercise of finding out who are/were the celebrity bigwigs with whom you share your birthday. Or the bigwigs who share their birthday with you, if you like it that way.
I was born on August 31, but the significance of the event never hit me until I realized that actor Richard Gere, physicist Ernest Rutherford and athlete Edwin Moses, to name a few, were born on the same day. It was a chastening experience that needlessly put me under pressure to feel -- if not realize -- that I must be as good. But let us appreciate that comparisons, though odious, are exciting nevertheless. After all, a little mental masturbation do you no harm.
Every weekend when I open the Sunday supplement of a "national" newspaper to know what's in store for me in the ensuing week, I first partake of the heady feeling to see the faces of those born with pre-eminence on the same day. And to compound your pleasure, there are other small mercies when you accept the salubrious fact that personalities like Barack Obama, Whitney Houston, Antonio Banderas, Pete Sampras, Alfred Hitchcock, Madonna, Sean Penn, Mila Kunis, Bill Clinton were just a few days here and there and would have been born on the same day had nature not conspired against me. With or within a whisker, destinies change and how! "We are all August born," is how I will choose to put it in mildest of words that you will not know I have coated with a generous helping of honey.
How often have I been told condescendingly by many that they remembered my birthday because I share it with some celebrity! Adulterated and dilute though the pleasure might be, it makes sense to look at the larger picture: That it was indeed my birthday and it was me who was being wished. For all the advances in Medicine, there is still no cure for a common birthday.
While the third in line to England's throne has finally been born, after a long nine months of speculation, conjecture and intense media scrutiny, I did some quick homework in the interregnum. If we assume an equal probability of being born any day of the year (not counting February 29th), every person shares birth date with about 1/365 of any given population. You sing 'Happy Birthday' on the same day as approximately 824,456 Americans, 3 million Indians, and 3.6 million Chinese. Now that's vicarious pleasure for you with a pinch of some simple arithmetic. You can ignore the latter at your sweet will.
As Kate Middleton squeezed out a son and the world went bonkers over the arrival of the Royal Baby, teen actress Selena Gomez lost no time in shouting from the rooftops that she has become the second most famous person to be born on July 22. That is if you concede to her that exalted status and allow her to bask in it. If you share the same birthday with her, and therefore with the Royal Baby, you may jump on to the bandwagon without feeling offended. There is a level-playing field here.
To me, its not the frills but the day itself. To  be born on the last day of the month is as much a blessing as a curse. When friends and well wishers demand a celebration, my hands are lost deep in my pockets, trying to locate the last of the rupee. Right, there are celebrities who share my birthday  but they are propitious and do not have to share my providence. That makes me one of a kind. Or so I would like to believe. :)