You can’t have your cake and eat it too!

By Atiya Abbas

Celebrating a birthday in KU is a huge rite of passage. As soon as the clock strikes twelve, the Wall is flooded with birthday messages and the ever-popular demand “Treat paki?” The friends of the birthday person in question plan on chipping in to buy a cake. This whole cake thing is more a girly activity than a guy’s although some instances to the contrary have also been seen.

Now the cake is an extremely efficient crowd attracting device. It says out loud what people otherwise would never have found out. Yes, it is my birthday and I have CAKE! People who have never even met your gaze come flocking to have a morsel of the delicious confectionary and in doing so bring along their posses. Of course, nobody wants to seem greedy and the birthday person plasters a huge smile on their face and offers the cake to the clamoring crowds, all the while thinking, ‘Who are you?”.

What left the bakery as a piece of culinary art is never the same once the cake attackers get their hands on it. The cutting implement is a plastic spoon or even more primeval, a piece of cardboard ripped from the cake box. The meaning of recycling acquires a new meaning when bits of the cake box are used as “plates” for “squares” (read: lumps) of cake. None of that matters, because once the cake is in your system, no one’s the wiser.

This year I came to know that an interesting celebration took place at the Karachi University. A political party celebrated, “drumroll please” Cake Day! What is Cake Day and why it is celebrated is not exactly certain, but really, are people that starved for amusement that a day had to be named after confectionary?

Marie Antoinette was right when she said, “Give them cake.” When it comes to marking special moments in one’s personal journey in this university, nothing does it better than sharing a cake with friends.