MY TAKE

THIS CRYSTAL BALL IS A LITTLE CLOUDY TODAY

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By SHAGORIKA EASWAR

 Our younger son claims that he is a “victim of the second child syndrome”.

It’s a compelling case.

Exhibit A: Hand-me-down clothes, toys, books...

Exhibit B: Fewer photographs in family albums.

Exhibit C: The most damning, the fact that I find it hard to recall his birth sign.

Our older son will tell you that if he ran in from outdoor play saying he’d fallen down, I’d  enquire about the state of his jeans before asking if he was hurt.

We’ll leave the discussion on perception versus reality, of their memories versus mine, for another day, but I am guilty as charged, on all counts.

Which woman will buy new clothes, toys or books when there are perfectly good ones waiting to be put to good use?

And though there are plenty of photographs documenting all his firsts, I will admit that there aren’t nearly as many random ones of our second son as there are of our first.

As for his birth sign, I am just not into birth signs. Never have been. I found it hard to fathom how the entire population of the planet could be divided into 12 and each part be assigned characteristics and possible futures.

Horoscopes in newspapers were lumped in the same category as predictions by men with parrots that pulled out a card or weighing machines on railway stations that spat out smaller cards – something to walk past with a no, thanks.

So, using the classic cop-out, I say, “It’s not you, it’s me”.

Except that it isn’t. Or at least that’s not all there is behind my taking astrological predictions with a big pinch of salt.

Because while I was an avowed skeptic as a young girl, and even a trifle smug, perhaps, over the years I realized that there were a million things I knew next to nothing about. I kept an open mind and changed my previous opinions on many things.

Not on this one thing, though.

Many years ago, in my newspaper days in another country, a colleague shared his experience doing the page that carried daily horoscopes. From a noted UK-based astrologer, they came via a syndicate. Included was a highlight on how the year would pan out for people who were celebrating their birthday on that particular day. This was before the days of e-mail and he waited for the  weekly packets to come by mail, which they did, without fail.

Until there was a postal strike.

The syndicate faxed the sheets, and it was business as usual.

Until another glitch in the pipeline halted the supply again. I forget the reason now – perhaps the astrologer was unwell – but there he was, without the daily forecasts.

Someone came up with the clever idea of recycling them. Carry older predictions. Mix and match. What was in store for a Capricorn a few weeks ago became what an Aries could look forward to next week.

No one reads others’ predictions – so no one would be the wiser.

So he shuffled the deck, so to speak. And all was well.

Until a lady called.

She was a regular reader, she said. She was going to be travelling and would be away on the day her birthday forecast for the year was published. Could he please read it out to her? Unsure about how to handle this, he said he would have to call her back.

A senior editor decreed that readers’ wishes were our command.

My colleague said he pointed out the minor issue of the recycled forecasts, hesitantly. 

The reader wouldn’t know that, read it out to her, he was told.

And so he did.

The final nail in the coffin, perhaps, was another story from another colleague who worked at a reputed magazine in another country.

She recalls receiving a few letters to the editor on how the horoscopes section they carried was highly negative. Full of illness and accidents, job loses and other potential disasters.

“I called the astrologer to share this reader response. And voila! The next month’s predictions were all bright and beautiful. We dropped the column.”

All of this came to mind when I read an opinion piece in the Toronto Star by public editor Bruce Campion-Smith. He had disturbing news, he wrote, in the piece dated March 2021. “The Toronto Star has found that Madalyn Aslan, a US-based astrologist whose horoscope writing was syndicated in Torstar papers and dozens of other publications, has in recent weeks occasionally recycled old predictions. Unsuspecting readers have been duped. For example, the entry for Virgo on March 6 was copied from the Oct. 31 entry for Aquarius.”

Now who could have foreseen such a thing?