Some industrious soul in the West, having run out of saints to commemorate, decided that the fourth of October ought to be christened International Toot Your Flute Day.
The premise is straightforward enough: take a holiday from our suffocating Asian modesty, pick up your brass horn, and blow it until your cheeks turn crimson.
Growing up in the post-independence decades, blowing one’s own horn was categorized somewhere between grand larceny and walking into a temple with your shoes on. The flock of elders—aunts with sharp tongues and teachers armed with wooden rulers—hammered a singular commandment into our heads: Let your work speak for itself; self-praise is the virtue of the scoundrel. Pride, we were assured with dark relish, went before a catastrophic fall. To boast meant you were hopelessly inadequate. Modesty was not just a virtue; it was an insurance policy against the evil eye and the gossip of neighbours.
Then, somewhere along the way, the script flipped entirely.
Thirty years ago, down on my luck and feeling like an utter cipher, I sat down to draft an old-fashioned Curriculum Vitae. Until then, I had viewed my life through the dismal lens of our collective conditioning: a quiet struggle, best kept under wraps. But on paper, a minor revelation occurred. The courses cleared, the clinical hours clocked, the quiet rebellions survived—I was not the non-entity I had imagined. It wasn’t vanity; it was a private diagnosis of survival.
Today, that humble inventory of qualifications has metamorphosed into an unholy circus. We no longer write resumes; we “curate identities” and posture as “personal brands.” The gentle pastoral flute has been replaced by a deafening vuvuzela. And to make matters far more comical, our loud-mouthed new world has imported Dickens’s Uriah Heep to write the captions. Scroll through any social feed and you will see someone nakedly trumpeting a promotion, an award, or a new bungalow, neatly wrapped in the sickening cellophane of: “Humbled and blessed.”
As a clinician and social observer, I see the psychological mess this hypocrisy creates. It is cognitive dissonance on an epic scale. The older generation sits nursing a quiet bitterness, feeling invisible because they never learned the cheap trick of self-advertisement. The younger brigade lives in sheer terror of irrelevance; to them, if an achievement isn’t broadcast to five thousand strangers, it never truly happened.
And my own generation? We found the slyest Indian compromise of all. We dared not blow our own trumpets, so we shoved the instruments into our children’s hands. We turned their report cards, Ivy League admissions, and NRI weddings into our personal trophies—basking shameless in the reflected decibels while protesting that we were merely proud, god-fearing parents.
Modern anxiety is no longer a dread of failure. Its sharpest bite comes from the horror of being invisible. We fled the suffocating intimacy of small towns where everyone knew our business, only to end up in concrete warrens paying therapists to cure our loneliness, desperately seeking digital applause from people we wouldn’t invite home for tea.
Perhaps the real utility of this ridiculous day isn’t to join the brass band of public boasting. There is a vast, clinical distinction between announcing “I am superior to you” and quietly admitting to oneself, “I have weathered the storm.”
If you must toot your flute today, do it without the megaphone. Leave out the inflated degrees, the bought citations, and the performative modesty. Blow a quiet, solitary note for the silent battles: the quiet terrors conquered on a clinic chair, the times you chose decency when malice was cheaper, the absurdities you laughed off, and the soul you refused to barter away for applause.
When was the last time you updated the resume of your inner life?
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