Ides of July!

Well, this is the time of the year when I turn older by an year. From the time I've a mental record of, I've always hated getting older. People expected you to act mature, behave responsibly, study well - whew! and perhaps build a rocket to moon as well! All this when the only change in me would have been that I would outgrown my previous birthday's shirt!

Ever since I was a small kid, the candle-cake thingy seemed funny to me! The sight of those conical party caps drives me sick with laughter - man, the guy who invented them must have a sick sense of humor, really! I have always avoided anything like a social thingy for my birthdays and had been lucky till I went to college, where, instead of cutting a cake, I was kicked and kicked and kicked and kicked and kicked till I used all my weight induced potential energy to break free and go home, with a smacked ass!

Once I was out of India, there was this kind of bday "fun" (for whom?) when after this ass-smack, everything from spoiled sambar to beer and tide detergent gets poured over you and you pretty much cant do anything other than pray that that gets over quickly. This ends only for some projectile action - eggs, bulbs and what-ever that breaks when it hits you are thrown at you. After some twenty two and half hits, it "hits" you that you can escape this by feigning a surprise hit on the eye. So I do that, people take pity and stop and as a mark of the end of ceremonies, pour whatever that is left behind from the previous round of pour-o-mania and leave you to lick your wounds - only to find you licked some tide on spoiled sambar crap - Yuck! A 2 hour bath later, with a just-returned-from-garbage-bin smell, you come out and get to sleep thinking whether the birthday was worth all this...... Perhaps birthdays are best left undisclosed!

Anyways, 23 is another number and has no connection to me! :P

Ever 16,
Karthik Sriram

Nonsense Trivia: Julius Caesar was assassinated on the ides of March and my bday falls on the ides of July (the month named after J. Caesar)- Now, I warned this was nonsense!