My friend C believes that exercise should be done the moment you get up so that you have it out of the way. I try to follow her advice but some days like yesterday things tend to go awry . No matter how hard I tried to get my best foot forward, there would be an unexpected hiccup and I would kick my exercise resolution down the road all the way till I missed it altogether. This was a real shame because I had woken up well before dawn. So I felt really bad that in all the 18 hours that I was awake, I couldn’t manage more than 4270 steps. And about 15 minutes of lazy yoga .

So this morning I was determined to walk before I got distracted with the day. And luckily I did .

After a beautiful work out, with my halo shining even more, I went about my day – visiting a sari shop from where I got a few saris printed. This was one of the shops I used to visit regularly with my mum and spending time there is truly a blast from the past. MK&Sons is an old established shop on Girgaon’s Main Street that keeps the most exquisite prints in cotton, Chanderi and Kota. And for this season, there’s nothing to beat a cool cotton.

Testing times

After half an hour or so, feeling pleased with myself, I was walking towards a taxi round the corner ( the road was dug up and how !) when suddenly I got a strange buzzing sound from my phone which was vibrating with an urgency that sent my heart racing . Unable to identify the tone, I picked up the phone only to see a notice with an exclamation icon on the left of the message. A strange woman was talking in a strange language and I tried desperately to turn the phone off .

With so many messages warning us about strange messages, I was sure this was a scam. And since last week my friend Dee was victim of a scam and by end of day, had half her bank accounts cleaned out, I was worried the same thing would happen with me !

In a panic I got into a cab and tried frantically to figure out what the message was and where it came from. No amount of jabbing and scrolling helped and I got even more of a scare when I was closer to my destination and the phone gave out another sound.

The message was in English this time and could understand what it was – a test message to alert all citizens about impending disasters.

I asked my taxi driver if he had received such a call but he hadn’t . This made me panic even more! My whole identity was on my phone . Had somebody hacked into my phone ? Would my money go? Would my identity go?

Luckily a watchman recognised my fright and said that he had received a similar message and that it was announced in the morning papers. But I, in my haste to get my exercise out of the way, didn’t read the morning papers !

Aaaaah.

I came home to find everyone calm and collected.

As usual it was only me who didn’t know what was happening.

Ciao