India, Feb. 20 -- Birthdays - any celebration, actually - only matter because it's when you can shamelessly ask everyone to indulge you. Eyeing a collector's-edition copy of RF Kuang's The Poppy War? Get your bestie to pre-order it. Need a new console for your gaming set-up? Your rich cousin can get that covered. The COSRX Snail Mucin combo? Let three colleagues chip in on the Tira voucher. The flip side is that when everyone is obligated to please you, it's easy to hate on the one person who gives you something that was originally meant for them.

The gifting police (aka online haters) have been making arrests. Reddit threads and Facebook groups have been calling out re-gifting, grumbling that it offends both, the original gifter and the...