The Late Night Cab

Hurriedly, she locked her boards and cables in her draw and walked out of the door wrapping her shawl around. As she signed at the security gates she glanced at her watch. 11:30 PM. The December night was chilly. She walked towards her cab clutching her shawl closer to her body.

The driver was not seen anywhere. She opened the rear door and waited inside. Her mobile in her hand lit up followed by a beep.

1 new message.

"What time are you coming home?".
Her thumbs quickly texted back a reply "Soon..".

The light from the mobile lit up her young face so gently that she looked angelic, even after clocking 14 hours in there!

Just then a man in white-and-white uniform walked down the parking and got into the Indica. With a quick gesture he asked where she had to be dropped to. "Koramangala, BDA complex. Bere yaaru ilva?", she asked, forming a sentence from her minimal Kannada vocabulary. He replied with a negative.

As the car zoomed past sleepy apartments, empty roads and unattended traffic signals, she pulled down the glasses of her window and kept herself awake. Her eyes could no longer stay awake but she forced them open as they drooped.

She kept an eye on the road. She kept an eye on the driver. Is he on the right road? Is he drunk? Am I safe here, in this car, with this driver? Is he... will he... What if.. Should I.. questions flew about inside her head.

She stared closely at the driver through the rear view. Unshaven. Unruly mop of hair. Pan chewed mouth. All of a sudden she felt so insecure that she wanted to lock herself within the comforts of her home. Far away, inside her head, voices screamed that she was, after all, a woman!

Oh yeah, a salwar-clad demure Indian woman? An Indian woman on whom you can cast your lecherous glance on? Sorry Sir! No more your weakling! The hands that make you rotis can not only type on the keyboard, but wield a sword too, for all you care!

She slipped her fingers into her hand-bag searching for her solace.

Yes, it was there, her pepper spray and her black-belt.

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To you, Pratibha Shrikanth Murthy. May your soul get the justice it deserves, soon.

You have comments on your photographs!!

If somebody collects all the comments people received on their photographs posted on different social networking sites, there is a very high possibility that they would all fall into any one of the below mentioned categories.

1. The made-for-each-other-comment : OK, Now this one will make 50% of all the comments. Any picture which has a guy and girl and nobody else in it will definitely fetch any of these comments with 100% chances : "Wow! You make a great couple", "Man, you both look great together!", "Cool.. both of you look fab in this one", "Awesome pair". Forget the fact that they might be a bro-sis pair, just-friends pair or yeah, as the viewer would have liked them to be - engaged. But who knows! Or rather, who cares!
2. The how-sweet-babies-comment : Alright, I agree, all babies are cute. I know it, you know it and the new mama knows it too. No matter what, the SNS rule states that no baby's pic should stay fetching for comments for longer than 10 seconds post the time of its upload! And a second rule states that every baby picture will receive a constant comment "Howwwwww s(ch)weeeet"; the only variable part allowed can be the number of 'w's and 'e's. Please note "Howww s(ch)weeeet" is the universal constant. Regional constants like "Chakkkkkkkara" are also substitutable.
3. The wow-comment : This comment is just that! You click next, and you actually tell it out before typing it down as a comment. This is usually found beneath pictures of great places, wall-paper candidates, somebody's new haircut/new look/ new clothes, new car, new bike, new wife... ok, just kidding, leave that last one out ;-) Short comment, nevertheless makes the the photo uploader glow like a young bride.
4. The LOL or ROFL- comment : This forms a minority because you rarely find people who would like to make a fool of themselves on social networking sites especially when single and ready to mingle :-P Hence, of the very few occurrences, the most common is beneath pictures of babies doing funny things, a bunch of guys all gone unusually crazy or next to a picture of your pet.
5. The Awesome-comment : All other comments that we have remaining will fall under this category. In case you are wondering what to comment on a particular snap and you badly want to do it too, then rely on these for they are multi-purpose comments - one size fits all! "Awesome", "Awesome!!", "Awwwwwwwwesome", "Truly Awesome!", "Simply Awwwwsome!", "Gosh! Awesome!", "Man! Its Awesome!!", "This-Awesome!!", "That-Awesome!!"... I think this word is the only other word whose popularity in usage has soared high post the success of SNS; the other word being, yes, you guessed it right, "fraaanship" :-)

The above ones are the safest that yours truly relies on and they satisfy most of the situations ;-) If you have other interesting categories, don't forget to pen them down in the comments section!