EDITOR'S CHOICE

love January. Not because a new year brings new hope and fresh starts and all those clichés, but because magazines are flush with predictions: Delicious, completely unreliable, foolishly optimistic and often despairing. I devour each word. (I also read everyone else's to check how their wind is blowing). If there is a palmist in the room, I will fling myself at him. I even subscribe to different daily predictions, all happily contradicting each other.

You get the drift? I am a astro-junkie. While others analyse news, I analyse the astrologers. A Bollywood favourite (she's not my compass but she's there in the paper I subscribe to, so?) sometimes sounds like she's done a tick-tack-toe and decided the stars will be indiffferent to everyone today. Ma something or the other seems to be constantly on Prozac. Marjorie Orr, Jonathan Swift and all the others who depend on my patronage, are battling for supremacy in astrology. After all, if there weren't gullible people like me, where would they be? I polish off the exercise with a bio-rhythm and an I-Ching reading. While the former gives me a wide berth to be just average at work, lazy and nasty (Dear Amy Fernandes: Today your intellectual level is 54%: you can continue working on reaching your objectives. Your physical level is 1%: it is advisable to avoid muscular effort. Your emotional level is 4%: it is worth putting off delicate matters!) the I-Ching always wags a finger like my mother (inside you there is great strength and you are fully aware of this. But beware: avoid over-confidence or arrogance and be sure you are always in the right.) Now given these two readings, what does that make me today? A plodding self-righteous prig?

I know I share this trait with millions of people around the world. My indulgence is, when compared to others, ascetic. But there are people who have astrologers on their board of directors. Some others are afraid to breathe if their astrologers forbid it.

The question I embarrassingly ask myself each day is: why do we do it? It comes out of a sense of insecurity perhaps, of not knowing what the future will bring. Or it could be just shameless voyeurism that constantly makes us peep into something that is none of our business. Yet. It's a human failing and a human strength, in that we're weak enough not to believe in ourselves, and humble enough to ask for help, (even if it is from other-worldly creatures). Sometimes it helps us comprehend our place in the cosmos. And sometimes, it's just convenient to blame our lives on the stars. That's my take. Some say Indians are more susceptible to peering into the future. Although I wouldn't entirely disagree (what's your rashee begins at birth), there is strong evidence that even the West's predilection with the future is equally intense. Think Nostradamus. Even Julius Caesar was a futuristic-faddist. Remember the Ides of March?

Wanting to know what lies ahead is a universal feeling, like love and hate. All I know is it's like the wonderbra. Uplifting for a moment, forgotten the next. If you know any better, write to me. Meanwhile, the 2010 celestial almanac is just out. Gotta run.

Happy New Year.

amy.fernandes@jademagazine.in