Every year on April 9th, people across the world celebrate something truly magical—International Unicorn Day. It’s not about real animals or scientific facts, but about something much more enchanting and imaginative: the unicorn.
As a child, I truly believed unicorns were real. I had first read about them in a storybook—the image of a glowing white horse with a single spiraled horn on its forehead, running through forests and clouds. Like unicorns, I also believed in fairies and demons. The world of imagination felt more real than reality. Every tale I read seemed possible, every magic believable.
I even remember seeing a white unicorn in a Bollywood film once. It was a blink-and-you-miss moment, but it stayed with me. That image of a unicorn—so pure, so gentle—looked like it had just stepped out of a dream. And still, one question haunts me: why would someone imagine a horse with only one horn? Why not two like a deer or none like a normal horse? What made the human mind give birth to such a unique creature?
Maybe the unicorn is not about logic but about longing. A symbol of something so rare and perfect that it can never be caught or caged. In ancient India, I found something similar in the Mahabharata—the story of Rishi Rishyasringa, a sage born with a deer’s horn on his forehead. He was pure, untouched by worldly pleasures, and had never seen a woman until he was seduced to bring rain to a drought-stricken kingdom. His story made me wonder if this idea of a horned, innocent being existed in our culture long before the Western idea of the unicorn took hold.
I also came to know that horses didn’t originally come from India—they were brought in later through Central Asia. And horses, as we know, never had horns. So unicorns, despite looking like horses, are born from pure imagination. They’re not meant to be real. They are meant to remind us of something deeper—purity, rarity, mystery, and belief.
In olden times, people thought unicorn horns could purify water, cure diseases, and protect against poison. In medieval Europe, traders even sold narwhal tusks as unicorn horns. Scotland, interestingly, still keeps the unicorn as its national animal, symbolizing power, freedom, and untamable spirit.
Interestingly, to establish a sense of masculinity, the Honda company produced a bike named Unicorn. What’s ironic is that most young boys riding the Unicorn bike may not even know that a unicorn is actually a mythical horse with a single horn.
I first came to know Rebecca Horn through her iconic performance piece Unicorn (Einhorn, 1970), which she presented at Documenta 5 in 1972. The work features a young woman walking through a field at dawn with a long white horn strapped to her head. Described by Horn as “very bourgeois” and “ready to marry,” the performer embodies both grace and societal constraint. Blending myth and critique, the piece references the unicorn as a symbol of purity while questioning traditional expectations of femininity. Unicorn is part of Horn’s early body-extension works, exploring identity, movement, and the body’s relationship with space and symbolism.
Today, International Unicorn Day is celebrated with joy and creativity. People dress in rainbow outfits, bake glittering unicorn cakes, craft horned headbands, and decorate their spaces with sparkle and magic. But beyond the celebration, this day is really about something we all need—the freedom to imagine.
To me, unicorns represent more than childhood stories. They are a bridge between reality and dreams, between logic and wonder. They remind me of a time when I believed everything was possible—and maybe, even today, it still is.
So on April 9th, let’s allow ourselves to believe again. Not just in unicorns, but in magic, in hope, and in the beauty of things that don’t always need to be explained.
