I have no idea what to write today. Earlier today I was brimming with ideas. Well, maybe not ideas as such but things I wanted to ramble about. I rambled away in my mind, quite pleased with myself. THIS, I told myself, is what Day 27 is going to be about. And yet here I am now with nary an idea as to what exactly was causing the brimming.

Since nothing is forthcoming let’s talk about Jetpack, the new kid-on-the-block who is pushing self as the one you should go to for all your blogging needs. WordPress is passé now, or so Jetpack tells me. There’s apparently a deadline too. A week. For quite a while now Jetpack has been warning me of dire consequences if I don’t switch over to it: No more notifications. No more stats. No more whatever.

Egad! What a bleak picture it paints! What will I do with no notifications and stats and whatnot! Though I am not one to be threatened into doing things, curiosity got the better of me today. Let’s see what Jetpack is all about. After all it has been selling itself to me all month! And so I ended up switching (my loyalty!) over.

Errr… umm… Where is it? The big change? Ahh yes. Instead of blue, the colour is now a bright green. Is that all? Oh. There’s a daily prompt in the dashboard in case you run short of topics to write. Everything else looks the same to me. Don’t tell me this all there is to all the build up? I thought angels were going to appear out of nowhere and rain rose petals on us bloggers and sing hymns. What a disappointment!

Here’s the prompt for the day: Are you superstitious? I will answer that. No I am not. What’s more, I try to reason with people and make them see a superstition for what it really is. But it’s an uphill task, Just ask someone why one shouldn’t cut nails on a Friday. It is a day like any other, right? Instead of reasoning it out, they will come up with more stuff to justify their irrational belief.

A popular one is that your front door should not face the south. I have always stayed in houses whose front door faced… umm who knows what direction, because you see I never bothered to find out. Yet another: Don’t step into a new house or start a new venture during the inauspicious time of the day, the ‘rahu kalam’. To this day I have never ascertained whether it was an auspicious time before doing anything.

Superstition is big business for those who hand out instructions and/or solutions to those who supposedly have landed in trouble by not following them. For others who don’t care for such things, life goes on as usual.

Shail Mohan 2023

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