I asked my good friend Samit Basu (you know, the celebrated author) a few months back why I was such a loser as a blogger (as opposed to a star candidate in everything else in life). He, probably not wishing to hurt my feelings by saying rude things, said it might be because I didn't blog often enough. Keep at it, he seemed to say, and one day you will have a blog to rival this and this and oh, maybe even this. (Reminds me of that story about a million monkeys on a million typewriters etc, but maybe that's not what Samit had in mind).

So anyway, I've been thinking about it (nah, I've not, just wanted to name-drop about the only celebrity I've been thrown out of Rodeo's for suspected under-ageness with) and so I've decided to blog more frequently.

Also, I've been going through old posts of mine and decided they're not half bad and that I can be pretty entertaining if I put my mind to it. So this, my loyal readers who still bother to check or are too lazy to delete my stub from Bloglines, is The Marauder's Map Redux (and of course I had to do it when blogspot seems to be blocked again. It's called perversity).

Anyway, so I shall leave you with a little anecdote from my scintillating life. Warning: autowallas feature.

R has been extremely uncooperative about buying a car, no matter how many frantic and tearful stories I tell him about how the autowallas in this city are treating me. So today when we were out together I wanted to show him how tough it is for a lady in this city who doesn't own a car. We were waiting at a crossing for an auto and I turned to him and said 'Now you just watch how painful this process is' . The next second, I'm not joking, an auto screeched to a stop two inches from my toe. Not to be daunted, I asked him most belligerently if he wanted to go to (the unfashionable end of most posh) Benson Town, turning towards R and saying with my eloquent eyes: 'Just watch this'.

And would you believe it? The bugger nodded his head and promptly started turning down the meter! That has not happened to me since I had a minor op for an ingrown toe-nail and asked the doctor for an extra-large bandage and kept it on for longer than necessary and looked at it most piteously when begging autowallas to take me home (mine not theirs).

R is of course convinced I make up all those sob stories about recalcitrant autowallas. There go my car buying plans for another year. If I didn't have Harry Potter 7 to look forward to I would just put my head in the oven and all.