Further on the issues of zodiac signs, let us explore the possibilities. Are two people sharing the same sign indeed similar in nature? What about two people sharing the same birthday? Say, for example, Mahatma Gandhi and me. We are both are born on October 2. (Thy shall be polite enough not to question about the years.) Now, let’s examine the similarities between Gandhiji and me.
1.Non-violence: Me? Non-violent? Ha ha! Dudes, you just gotta see me at it. I am a man (or woman) you wouldn’t want as your enemy. I could beat you to pulp. Smash your brains out. And I don’t even need a gun. Of course, these violent interactions should only be restricted to the Network Neighbourhood (Best place to play computer games).
2.The famous Gandhi glasses: You know I have been thinking seriously about this one. I remember this one day during my PG hostel day when I had put on dark red lipstick and round glasses (without any lenses) and had gone around parading as a slutty nurse. Nobody bought that one! I guess I should have put on a nurse’s uniform. Hmmm. So, I am seriously considering the famous Gandhi glasses. Now I only need to get some power in my eyes.
3.Babes on both shoulders: Yeah! I wish!
4.The bare-chested khadi dhoti look: Yeah! You wish!
And then people actually believe in zodiac signs. Why? Why? Why? Why would any intelligent self-respecting person show any interest in it?
Hey, by the way, could you all leave your zodiac signs in the comments??!!

I remember attending a Richard Dawkins talk, which I had expected to be either on his theories or his books but had actually turned into an anti-astrology/ anti-ghosts/ anti-anything-that-science-cannot-explain speech. I can still feel his vehemence spurting out in his words. He spoke about a guy he knew who worked in a London daily. Another non-believer like Dawkins and in charge of the astrology section, this guy had cut out various passages from different magazines. He had then proceeded to do an ‘In Pin Safety Pin, In Pin Out’. That was how he chose the forecasts for the week. The following week he was flooded with letters that said how great an astrologist he was and how everything he had written in the column had come true.
I still can’t stop myself from checking out my forecast of the week.

I think it is high time I stopped thinking about you. High time that i moved on in my life.
And I think i have found the cure. 6 pegs a day keeps all the pain away.
My motto from today onwards: Avoid hangovers. Stay drunk.
Sigh.
THIS is not a happy high!!

Today is just one of those days.
I remember coming home from work last night at some unearthly hour and passing out on my bed despite the damn crows croaking outside. I must barely shut my eyes and it was time to wake up. My roommate S and I were running very late for work (When I say late I mean too late to be early. Our intention had been to get to work an hour early.) I ended up taking a cab to office, something I just cannot afford this month, and generously offered to give S a lift. We passed this fabulously expensive restaurant that serves the yummiest and the most fabulously expensive plaits. Obviously the temptation was too strong to resist. (Moral of the story is that once you start spending money there’s no end to it.) We were at a signal, happily munching away our fabulously expensive plait, when a young boy with a baby hanging from his shoulders approached our cab and started begging.
‘Didi, das rupaye de do, bacche ko doodh pilana hai. Bhagwan aapko sukhi rakhe. Aap dono ki jodi salamat rakhe.’
S and I looked at each other. Had we heard correct? Eww Eww Eww!
We have now decided that we will start spending more time with other people.

My roommate S and me are the laziest creatures during the weekends. We plop ourselves in front on the TV with everything in roll-able/ crawl-able distance so we don’t have to get up. Unless it is to go to the bathroom. And we’re working on an alternative for that as well. This avoids ‘You’re closest to the kitchen’ and ‘You’re closest to the newspaper rack’ (This was to check if there was anything worth watching on TV) kind of conversation.
But natural, the comparison to Joey and Chandler and their famous not-moving-from-the-arm-chairs-episode came up. The conversation that ensued is as follows.

Me: Man, we are just like Chandler and Joey
S: Yeah man. I don’t want to be Chandler though.
Me: Good. I’d rather be Chandler. He’s much better.
S: And I’d rather be Joey. At least I am handsome.
Me: I am funny.
(The conversation starts heating up.)
S: Stupid funny! I am an actor.
Me: Yeah an out of work actor.
S: I am in Days of our lives
Me: A soap Opera. Sniff Sniff. Hand me my kerchief.
S: You are just an accountant.
Me (immediately defensive): I am not an accountant
S: Yeah. Then what do you do?
Me (Racking my blank memory): I uhh… I uhh … I uhh.. I at least have a steady job. You don’t even have that.
S: I get all the girls.
Me: I could get girls. I just don’t need any girls. I am married to a great girl.
S (in a scornful voice): You are married to a maniac with OCD.
Me (getting angry): Hey! At least I am married.
S: Who wants to get married!
Me (sarcastically): People with a GOAL in life. Something you can’t even spell!
(We both pause now, out of breath. Our eyes spitting fire. We turn to the TV screen for a respite. Baywatch is on.)
Me: Look at them run
S: Run. Run. Run
Me (smiling blissfully at S who is smiling back blissfully): Pass me a slice of Pizza, will you?

I am walking alone in the dark, on a cobbled road. Scared, because I know that someone is following me. Someone hungry for my blood, watching my every move. Waiting for me to make a mistake. Waiting for me to stumble and fall. I keep turning around but I see nothing in the dark Sometimes I catch glimpses of shapes in the shadows, silhouettes in the dark. Are they more than one? My progress is slow, hindered further by my constant turning around. I walk faster, unwilling to show that I am scared. Can they sense my fear? I can almost feel their breath on my skin. I stop looking back now, breaking into a run. I keep running. Running into the dark and into the unknown. I run and I run. I am getting tired. I know that I will collapse soon, out of breath and out of energy.

A few days back I had taken a lift home from a male colleague in the office. In the busiest stretch of our drive, we were incessantly being cut-off by an extremely inept driver. My colleague reacted with the typical MCP statement ‘Must be a woman.’
I opened my mouth to refute him, armed with proven statistical data (charts and graphs), that women are better drivers than men, when we managed to over-take the car in question. The driver was a man!
What you see is what you believe.

Toro’s kind advice ‘Chill marneko maangta hai, kya boley? Fridge mein baithneka’ got me thinking. I gave it a lot of thought (precisely 1 minute 37 seconds) and my conclusion is that everything in life is about putting your head in the right place.
Let us take my situation for example; there are only two ways that I can think of to get myself out of the miserable depths of despair.
1.Put my head into a fridge
2.Put my head into an oven

Would it not be so much easier
If I let the tears run
Have I not lost everything
Though the battle is won

There are many people I admire. And there are many things that I have learnt from them. But it was my dog Snoopy who taught me one of the most valuable lessons.
Mid last year my parents shifted from Calcutta to Raipur. From the flat that they had lived in for almost twelve years into a huge bungalow with sprawling gardens. Snoopy had started showing symptoms of age in Calcutta but by the time they shifted to Raipur he had turned completely deaf and blind. He went into a major depression. Everything was unfamiliar to him. The smells, the rooms, the arrangement of the furniture, the house-hold help, the fact that my brother was not around (I had already shifted out of the house a couple of years ealier). He tried moving around a bit but he kept banging into things and hurting himself. He went into a phase where he lay around in his bed, refusing to move, getting up only when it was time for food. Food was his only motivation in life. He really was just ‘living to eat’. It saddened all of us immensely. Snoopy had always been the happy-cheerful-inquisitive dog. Even the presence of Whoopy (his partner) did nothing to pull him out of his depression. He was letting go and there was nothing that we could do.
And then suddenly things changed. (I give full credit to Whoopy for this. She was in heat and all that excitement got Snoopy on his feet). He started moving around the house. He started going out in the sun again (He loves sunning himself, like all Dachshunds). It is impressive the way he knows exactly where everything is kept in the house. He seldom bumps into things anymore. He runs around the house. (Again, I would give the credit to Whoopy. They have this strange sexual game. If Snoopy is sitting quietly she’ll go entice him and get him all excited. This is usually followed by her getting bored of the whole game and she moves on to something more exciting like mice or lizards. Meanwhile, Snoopy is all excited and starts following her around the house, jumping at her at every opportunity. When he still had his eyesight, it was an easy game for him. Now, with only his smelling power, the game is even more exciting and frustrating. Whoopy the chalu one gets him all excited and goes away, usually into the garden. And poor Snoopy runs in circles around the house, sniffing away.)
Indeed, it is so easy to give up on things. But Snoopy taught me how to accept and deal with things and to move on. All we really need is a Whoopy in our lives.

A stranger shared a drink with me
A stranger held my eyes
A stranger spoke to me through the evening
An unspoken rule of ‘no lies’

The stranger led me back home
The stranger slept with me that night
The stranger held me close to his heart
But kept a distance right

The stranger left me when the morning came
The stranger left me alone in my bed
The stranger I knew was gone forever
But I think I found a friend instead

The weekend has been fairly amusing.

It started on Friday evening with my putting my foot in my mouth. Again!! And thanks to Sangeetha, the whole wide world knows about it.

Saturday night we went clubbing. I don’t remember much of the evening, except that there was a lot of dancing, a lot of shots and that I was the only one not drunk (Very high, yes. But not drunk.). The bill came to a total of twenty grand. I am still in shock (I keep staring ahead and saying ‘twenty-thousand’ intermittently). And I am totally broke for the next few months. (All you sympathetic souls out there, donations will be graciously accepted.)

Then on Sunday evening, I felt this urge to have ice cream. In Bandra, the Naturals ice cream parlour is the third shop on a road that was one-way against us. My friend turned into the road and parked her car at the corner. Let me clarify that she didn’t really enter the lane, she just parked at the corner. We had just parked and were locking our doors when suddenly there was this huge woman’s face on our wind-shield screaming like a banshee ‘Get back. Get back.’ Stunned into a stupor we were slow to react. She screamed again, ‘‘Get back. Get back. I will take away your licensee. Get back.’ For those who have seen the movie Ghost and remember the ghost in the train screaming at Patrick Swayze ‘Get out of my train. This is my train’, this was a replay of that scene.
I have never seen my friend back her car that fast.

The problem is not that I miss you all the time. The problem is that the memories that I had thought I had wiped away with my tears always hit me when I am least prepared.

Do you remember that evening, cold because of approaching winter, when you and I had sat in the dark wrapped up in sheets? We had talked for hours. About our dreams, about you, about me and about us. About a house, walls full of shelves of books and a small hidden corner for all the Mills & Boons.

Ever experienced a love so intense that you felt would eat you alive? Ever held a baby or a pup in your arms and felt like smothering it? Ever hugged someone so tight that you almost choked the person to death? If you have, why is so difficult to understand why a female Praying Mantis eats up the male after mating. That, my friends, is the ultimate expression of true love.

A guy in my office claims to know how to read hands. So I, like any typical girl, went up to him wanting to know deep and profound things about my future. He looked up after five long minutes of staring intensely at palms and I thought, ‘Here it comes. The prophecy. Mystical secrets about my obscured future’. And he said, “You have really soft hands.”
#$%^ &*@@$$ !!!!!!!

I have the unbelievable knack of making a fool of myself.
On the way to work today I met up with my friend at Bandra, from where we usually take a cab to office. As I opened the door of the cab to get in first she passed on a big plastic cup of “not nice at all” cold coffee. (Now what kind of a friend would want you to try ‘not-nice-at-all’ cold coffee from a coffee dispenser is beyond me!) As I stepped in with my bag slung on my shoulders and a big plastic cup of cold coffee in my right hand, my friend commented “Wow. What a clean taxi! Nice seat covers.” That very moment my leg (right leg) slipped on the weird plastic cover on the floor of the taxi. My left leg was still hanging outside. I tried to grope the seat. But it was a slightly difficult task, as my left hand was still on the door and my right hand was holding the big plastic cup of cold coffee. I landed facedown on the seat with my legs in the air sticking out of the cab. And the big plastic cup of cold coffee had spilt all over the nice seat covers. I don’t think the cab driver will ever think of me in a good happy light.

It's hard to believe that there are other people around whose knowledge of sports is worse than mine.
Background: India-Pakistan cricket match on. Two of my friends conversing-
She: So is India winning?
He: Only India has batted so far. India made 394 runs. Pakistan needs to make 395 to win.
She: So Pakistan needs to make only one run?

him: so how are you doing?
me: ok
him: just ok? or good?
me: not good
him: hmmm
me: but not bad. so that's good right?

A warning sign
I missed the good part, then I realised
I started looking and the bubble burst
I started looking for excuses
Come on in
I've gotta tell you what a state I'm in
I've gotta tell you in my loudest tones
That I started looking for a warning sign

When the truth is, I miss you
Yeah the truth is, that I miss you so

A warning sign
It came back to haunt me, and I realised
That you were an island and I passed you by
And you were an island to discover

Come on in
I've gotta tell you what a state I'm in
I've gotta tell you in my loudest tones
That I started looking for a warning sign

When the truth is, I miss you
Yeah the truth is, that I miss you so

And I'm tired, I should not have let you go

~Warning Sign, Coldplay

I don’t feel like working at all. I’ve suddenly switched from being a workaholic to being the laziest person around. I stay back late at work very reluctantly just because I have to and it is only my misplaced sense of responsibility that drags me back to work early next morning.
I feel like the under-sexed wife of an over-sexed husband. I can’t cope up and somehow I don’t want to. I am actually getting headaches, real honest headaches, timed to the dot. The clock approaches nine and poof! My head starts hurting. Now only if I could tell my work, ‘Not tonight darling, I have a headache.’