Kook magnet

I have this theory about me and every other day there are incidents that prove beyond doubt that I am right about my theory. So what is this theory that I have? It’s quite simple—that I attract all the possible kind of weirdoes and whack jobs there are to know. Now this is not simply based on random incidents. Almost everyone here has a story to tell that involves a weird person, an unprovoked incident and a public setting.

For me the problem is more pronounced. It is not limited to just one country; it’s just made my ‘experience’ a little more varied—from scary taxi rides to chatty taxi drivers to pestering street guys to downright creepy stalkers. Some of the incidents are funny, laughable actually while some have scared the living daylights out of me!

Even as a child, I remember being harassed for no fault of mine. There are so many stories involving me and lunatics. Seriously! Mad men or women roaming on the streets feel some strange pull towards me. I have been slapped, kicked and taunted on busy streets with my family around. From all the people available, these lunatics zero in on me and attack! These attacks became so frequent that my mom would keep an eye out for them and tuck me away from their sight. It seems scary but the incidents were random; they never followed a pattern of any sort. A family friend suggested that it had something to do with the time of my birth and the moon’s position. Whatever the reasons, I haven’t had an encounter with a lunatic for a long time and I hope it stays that way.

Talking to some of my friends about my propensity to attract society’s misfits, they believe that I am overacting. According to their theory, every person meets a certain number of these so called crazies; the only difference being that I have only about met the crazies and never the nice ones. Which is my point exactly! Why do I always have to be the one encountering these species of the weird kind? Haven’t I fulfilled my quota of the strange and peculiar? What’s with the nice people? Why can’t they feel this pull toward me?

I feel that I walk around with this big target on my head. My friends feel that there is something in my body language that screams ‘easy target’. I am too defensive, too jumpy and too timid on the street. I take that as an insult, considering that the city I spent most of my life in, is guaranteed to make you bold and street smart. Me, who can push and jostle her way around crowded streets, too timid? Egged on by my friends, I am now working on changing this misconception of me as too timid. I put on my fiercest face everywhere I go, scaring some of my friends in the process. I am assertive, talk a lot more loudly and yes it’s done me a lot of good. Just when I thought that my friends were right and I was wrong, and this whole assertiveness has something to it, my amazing run with good people came to a screeching halt. A few days ago I got into a taxi, which coincidentally happened to be the same taxi as the previous day, and as my luck would have it, the taxi driver suggested picking me up every day! I just sighed, said a polite no and put on a fiercer face, and promptly set out earlier than usual today. Why tempt my rotten luck, when I know that the fates will always work against me?