Friday, November 06, 2009

My Orkut "Today's Fortune"

I am no sucker for those trite thought-of-the-day quotes, though I have begun to enjoy the occasional "Today's Fortune" on my orkut page. There was one I quite liked some time back and I had sent it to some of my friends, especially the ones suckling gloriously on Facebook, which incidentally, with some notable exceptions, gathers every triviality under the sun under its imbecile aegis. Well that day the fortune was:
Watch what you say — of those who say nothing, few are silent
But what I got today made me write a blog post. I did send that one too but without any catty design. It was, in fact, I must admit, a moment of edification. Some friends did reply. Here are some of the responses:
  1. I miss orkut :(
  2. Couldn't agree more. Thanks for sending it my way. Here is something similar: Imagination is the reality waiting to be created. Or, Imagination is reality-in-waiting.
  3. Fabulous quote. True and liberating.
I was glad that these words did have a power to lighten up quite a few of us. It seemed to provide a key to some of the issues we continue to grapple with inside ourselves. It did give us a reason to be hopeful. It spoke gently and confidently to something deep inside us that refuses to surrender to hedonistic cynicism of the times. And most importantly, it became alive because we shared it among ourselves. By the way my orkut "Today's Fortune" read:
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

1 comment:

Pooja said...

A fortune for hope! Interesting, though I could only fully understand its import on a second read and a little incident:
Just yesterday, a colleague came to my desk and started rummaging through the dummy printouts of the next day’s edition. He was looking for Listings’ Page that carries the daily horoscope. I asked him if he really believed in what he sought. “Well, if nothing else it feels nice to read about nice things that ‘could’ happen,” he smiled while reading his day’s fortune a day in advance!
In a newspaper office, the unforeseen day is nothing but past and a hopeful prelude to the next.
And, sometimes how editors have to literally “invent” future by either deleting/squeezing or adding/padding nice words to an astro-columnist’s piece as per given space!