A former boss, editor of the paper I worked for at the time, never let me go further into the large and cacophonous office than the door of her room when I came back from a lunch out...until she had read her favourite section of the afternoon tabloid I invariably carried back with me. “What? No paper!” she would exclaim in a very shrill and distressedly sharp blast, on the days when I didn’t have the aforementioned publication with me. Not because she wanted to know what the top story of the day for the city was. Not because she wanted to know who had hit the headlines in the latest scandal of the day. Not because she wanted to know what shares were going up or down. But purely because she wanted to know what was going to happen to her that day. For her, reading her daily horoscope made it all worthwhile!
And the things are truly addictive. I begin my day with a scan of what the stars foretell for my zodiac sign. To make sure, I also check what the day is to hold for my sign following the Indian system, which is always somehow diametrically opposed to that in the star charts followed by western predictors. If one says I will find money coming to me, the other cites an upswing in expenditure. The first will promise me rekindled romance with an old flame, when the second assures me that the state of my love life is in the doldrums, with no action and no fire. A will swear that domestic dispute is possible while work goes smoothly, but B will insist that peace is not on my professional agenda, while my personal existence is happy.
I like what I read sometimes, even though it may not promise me the happiest of days. “Emotional upsets will make your day difficult, but you find stability and balance at home with close partners.” Which is, for me, a fairly ideal state of being – go home and relax, it tells me. But then there is the “Professional success is all yours, but make sure that you are seen and heard to enjoy it fully.” That makes me stay at work, instead of heading for the first train out of town. On the other hand, I worry, since “You are accident prone today, so take extra care, especially when working.” Oops. Is that smoothed out with “Health will be excellent today – you will feel and look better than ever”? I wonder…
I should actually stop wondering and worrying about my day/week/month/year as prognosticated in print. After all, once upon a long ago time, I was assigned the job of producing the page of the newspaper that carried the horoscopes and the comics – which seemed very suitably juxtaposed as two elements of a whole spelling entertainment coexisting in a limited space. And it was a hoot. Most days, the comics came in before the horoscopes, being part of the package a syndication service provided us with. Then, when the ’scopes were finally available, they needed to be edited, often even translated from obscure grammar and mysterious spelling into more structured, comprehensible English. Sometimes, when the astrologer who did the work for us was not able to deliver, I scrambled, juggled and, on a few memorable occasions, made them up. Of course, my manic, imaginative, wildly creative predictions were usually reined in and made sober and thus credible by my features editor of the time, who was routinely heard to protest, “You can’t say THAT!”, much to my irritated frustration.
Under these circumstances, how can someone believe a horoscope published online or in print? (Whether these bits of illogical and unscientific nonsense can be taken as gospel in any form, verbal or written, is up for debate.) Who knows – after all, what the stars foretell could actually be a nicely formulated figment of a sub-editor’s creativity, rather than a carefully calculated result of a certain alignment of planets! Think about it.
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