So I have this problem. I am a cry-baby. I cry at the drop of a hat. Books, movies, TV serials… from the banal to the ‘deep’ nearly everything can make me cry.

Frankly my dear I don’t give damn? Booo hoo. (An hour of crying and a headache later).

Joe Hardy sad because girlfriend dies? Sniffle (yes, that too. I kid you not)

Harry Potter, angsty, misunderstood and Sirius dead? Waaail.

The time when Grey’s Anatomy’s Meredith looks at dishy McDreamy and says: "I love you, in a really, really big pretend to like your taste in music, let you eat the last piece of cheesecake, hold a radio over my head outside your window, unfortunate way that makes me hate you, love you. So pick me. Choose me. Love me" and I knew he wouldn’t leave the wife…I bawled my eyes out.

And these are just the trivial fictitious things that make me cry. It’s a joke with my friends. An embarrassment to my dad (poor guy, he doesn’t get why a completely objective debate on Singur and Mamata triggers the waterworks. Its isn’t easy for a man to be surrounded by so much of oestrogen) and an irritant to mum. And well if you knew me, one of these reactions will be yours. I cry, when I’m so angry, I could kill you. I cry when I’m deliriously happy. I cry when I’m tired and frustrated (yes the office loo and too much work has done that to me). I cry when I’m hurt. Or embarrassed. Or humiliated. Or just mildly sad and wistful. I cry sometimes just because I need to. So if there is any basic spike of emotion I will cry. I don’t know why. Like when I’m having a fight this independent evil part of my brain decides, "oh she is mad now…lets make her blubber like a fool".

Mostly, this doesn’t bother me anymore. Everyone who knows me knows I cry, so they’ve sort of accepted it as "my thing". I’ve made my peace with it all. The red eyes, the puffy eyelids, the sudden blocked nose. The horrible look of pity I get when people realise that I’ve been crying. The slight ache behind my eyes when I’m all cried out. Even those times when the credits roll on a rom-com that I’ve been watching with friends and they look at me incredulously and say, "What? You didn’t cry?" Am actually ok with it all. I even find it funny at times.

But sometimes I think about this other girl I know off. She happens to be friend of a friend of a friend and I’ve never met her. Sometimes I wish I was her. She has this bizarre condition that makes her unable to cry. "My lachrymal glands are dry and almost don’t function," she had confessed to my friend. Which means she lugs around eye drops wherever she goes. And has to put it in her eye every hour when she’s wearing lenses and in general suffers a lot of general discomfort because of her condition. "Only if something hurts really badly and I’m in tremendous physical pain, can I squeeze out, like, one tear," she’d said.

Sometimes I wish I was her.