What's your number?? - Week 2

The most imaginative thing that any writer can come up with has already been done. It was by the genius who came up with the notion of a writer's block. There is nothing more fictitious than that.

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What do you do, when you've nothing to do? These days this question's answer will be mostly centred around the usage of our smartphones. Our incessant craving for company is satisfied by this gadget. Please remember that I'm accepting that I'm myself indulging in this timepass.

But before our phones became smarter than us, before we had everything at our fingertips, how did you spend time when you were alone? If you can't imagine a scenario, think how you had spent your time on a journey some ten years back.

Reading of books - novels, comics and otherwise - and listening to music would be the more popular answers now. I had two peculiar pass times​ of my own. Ever since my father taught me that I could decipher the location of my presence by reading shop boards, I used to spend my time on the window seat to do just that. Almost all the nameboards of the shops have the name of the place towards the bottom left corner. It's really helpful when you're traveling to a new place.

My other hobby is to read vehicle registration numbers. The inspiration for this one comes from a quest to find out other vehicles with the same number as the one under my possession. And if you've tried doing this, you would know how hard it is.

In spite of the hundreds of vehicle registrations happening daily at the thousands of RTOs in all the states of this country throughout the year; in spite of all these vehicles moving from one point on India's map to another; in spite of all these vehicles only getting a number from 1 to 9999; you would be hard pressed to find another vehicle with the same registration number as yours. True story.

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Now, if you would allow me to use my writers liberty, I would like you to replace in the previous paragraph - vehicle registrations by childbirth, vehicles by people, registration numbers by their personalities; and many other such nuanced substitutions - at the end of which that paragraph would be the perfect analogy for a person finding another person who is just like them. That's also really hard to do and extremely tough to realize.

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And as we celebrate the second year of our marriage, and the third year of our realization that both of us have the same "registration number", I would like to thank God - for he had put me in the right place at the right time to meet the right person.

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Until next week.