Perfect gifts come from the most unlikely pincodes

This is not a gift guide. Though I love them and would find life very hard without them. If anything, this is a gift post-mortem—an examination of the corpse of our gifting good intentions.

- NISHA SUSAN

The universe holds many gift-giving personality types. Many of us know gift-givers who give us expensive, iridescent gifts that are awful. Their awfulness is of a special variety that they are too ugly to be ornamental and too ornamental to be useful. A seven-layer diya holder in royal purple with a mirrored base that is as tall as a two-year-old, for instance. If you think this is highly specific and based on a gift I was given, you are mistaken. This is just an example of the kind of gift you could receive and spend a corresponding two years to re-gift. You may conclude that the kind of person who gives these gifts is simultaneously tasteless and thoughtless. But that isn’t true.

Sure, you may get such a gift in the mass-distribution moments of festival seasons or weddings. However, the person who customarily gives this kind of terrifying gift can be sweet and well-intentioned. And there lies the problem with gift-giving. When you give one, you are hoping that the person who gets it understands what you intended. When you get one, you are trying to X-ray the box and arrive at a cardiac reading. What lay in the red heart that wrapped this gift in pink?