Yippee, and a very happy new year to you, too. Looks like Poila Boishakh is going to usher in an era of television free from those po-faced humbugs who pretend they know all about your future when they failed even to predict the day astrologer-sponsored channels would be banished. Or that a degree in astrology would be laughed off the college campus. To think our children would live in times when you had to qualify to lie your head off. Mars forbid.

So there?s cause to celebrate, because as a reader of first-word-to-finish of every horoscope to appear in most newspapers around the globe, I can say with outstanding authority that astrology is strictly for the birds.

And, like over-population, determines all that is wrong with us. The fatist attitude (no, that is not a typo ? I did not mean fatalist), as I was saying this fatist, attitude is what causes us Indians to sit back on our fannies and contemplate the worst injustices with equanimity. ?God?s wish,? we sigh, and then lie back and enjoy it.

I can understand reincarnation. Crimes I committed in my last birth are the only explanation for why I?m treated with such laughing derision in this one. But what?s all this claptrap about ?Oh, my fate!? ?Oh, my destiny!? ?Oh, my thingummyjig??

When Arnold Schwarzenegger said in the trailer of a godforgotten film (I can never remember the titles of Arnie movies, can you?), ?Eet izz your destinee? I wanted to smack his gap-toothed face. Likewise Omar Sharif?s character in the rather more memorable Lawrence of Arabia, when he pointed to his forehead and declaimed, ?It is all whritten.? What?s written? And who gave them permission to write it? If my ?destinee? is already ?whritten?, does it mean I can charge ahead with my career as a mass murderer or child rapist or a circus ringmaster? No? Good. I?m glad you agree.

As for the stars we were born under, the less they say the better. At least three astrologers had told me when I was young and nearly as foolish that I would marry a doctor ? which I did anything but. I did carry a torch for a medico ? still do ? but he escaped my clutches double fast. And so here I am, alone, romanceless and with no medical attention in sight.

Linda Goodman tells us more US Presidents are born under the sign of Scorpio than any other. I interpret this as, we are 11 times as likely as those born under other birth signs to be shot.

So I say, chaps, the next time life lams you a hard one, take it on the chin. Somewhere in your youth? or childhood? or last incarnation? you asked for it. As for the interpreters of our birth signs, they are, shall I say, persons of uncertain births themselves.