Nisha and Gaurav have been friends for six years now and have been dating each other for the last two years. Gaurav had been in love with Nisha from the first time the two had spoken in college. However, with Nisha it had been a bit different. When she had met Gaurav, Nisha had been in a tumultuous three-year relationship that had left her an emotional wreck. Her ex had been incapable of commitment and had been a serial womanizer. Even while Nisha's trust in relationships and her self-confidence had reached rock bottom, Gaurav had stood by her, an undemanding friend. Eventually Nisha was dumped and it took her a year to get over the scars. Slowly, Gaurav's love and patience won and Nisha veered towards him. The last two years had been bliss for the two: Gaurav got the girl he loved and having seen the uglier side of what a man can be, Nisha knew how good Gaurav was...

...OR Misery means a million bucks... Or a million hit counts, or maybe even four. 'Bad news is good news', and it hasn't been truer than it is today. We read bad news, we comment on it, we charge by the minute on it, our political ideologies center around it, we ask for votes based on it, we sell it to nations; and if there is no bad news, we create it. Lawyers, doctors and most definitely the media would go out of business if it were not for bad news and someone else's misery. Heck, we revel in misery. People dying is a news flash, kidney trade translates into TRPs and litigation, someone raped is a prime time reconstruction, a marriage breaking down is national gossip... As long as someone suffers, world economies will move, leaders will be impeached and elected, gossip magazines will sell, TRPs will soar and even Chicken Soup for the Soul series will sell only because there...

And you can see the sign for yourself: At one of the coffee stalls at the international terminal, Indira Gandhi International Airport, New Delhi. Welcome to India. "You can buying many things in India and you still have many money. You can eat many foods in India - some very much spicy - and you still have many money, all this I am learning when I went here in Delhi two weeks back," she said to me. The Indian hosts whose party it was and their guests roared with laughter at her description of India. Someone said, "I just LURVE her accent." She was French. I swear the grammatical mistakes she made - or weird English she spoke - was EXACTLY the kind of English many Indians (or most) speak. Yet, no one loves an Indian's accent. It's funny but never sexy. And leaving the world aside, even most Indians get embarrassed when a fellow countryman speaks broken, faulty or bad English. Why? Shrug,...

... to getting hooked. So I had announced in the 'Do only bad girls smoke post?' that I was meeting a doctor who'd help me quit smoking. I did go and spend two hours sitting and talking with her. The first thing I learnt? That I don't have any oxygen in me and the carbon monoxide levels in me are 20 + ppm. For heavy smokers. Also, she asked me if there was any phlegm with my 'smoker's cough'. No, there isn't, which apparently is really bad news because it means the 'cilia' in my lungs (little hair that work as filters) are either dead or defunct. Basically, of all the 500 poisons we intake each time we take a puff, ALL are in me. "How will a doctor help?" someone had asked me, "Quitting smoking is about will power, if you don't have it, no one can help you quit." While it is true that the first and most important step...