The Lost Art of Conversation

15 years ago, I met a boy from South Bombay. He was quite ridiculously intelligent and creative. He was funny and crazy to boot. I was a neophyte in Mumbai, all wide eyed and wondering, with the metaphorical small-town-South-Indian-coconut-oil still on my hair. For all our cultural differences, we could’ve well been from two different planets.

No this is not a love story. Definitely not one with a happy ending.

This is the story of the fast vanishing Art of Conversation a.k.a. “talking shit.”

We talked miles and miles of deserted streets in Fort, Church Gate, Nariman Point, Colaba and Marine Drive. We talked hours and hours of Roxy, Metro, Sterling, and Eros theatres. We talked years of All Stir Fry, Under the Over (alas, not there anymore), Churchill and Crystal.

We talked shit man. From “leading a life of quiet desperation” to Douglas Adams, Martin Scorsese, Incubus and Succubus, Warm Water under a RedBridge, sizzling brownies and the “greater creative question.”

We discovered each other, the world around us and a few higher truths. We played with ideas, challenged notions, comforted each other and made each other laugh—a lot.  We built intimacy and empathy.

Other friendships often followed this template—“Let’s sit down and talk all night.”

When I went to the US, it was literally talking all night, but enabled by G Talk. I just checked and I have records of 11,990 chat conversations dating from ’08! I kid you not!

And we only talked shit—bad poetry, good poets, movies, minutiae of our lives, a shoe rack so expensive to custom make that it assumed a life of its own as a Goddess named Xu, and intimate details that we might have been embarrassed to talk in person.

We invested time. In each other. In connecting. To talk.

Then we all changed jobs, moved countries, got married, got divorced, became parents and moved out of GTalk.

Maybe we all got older. Busier with our lives. Carrying mountains that we were only meant to climb. Caught up in situations where there was nobody to talk to.

Or maybe our smart devices and social networking platforms have increasingly isolated us from each other. We are probably prisoners of our own device—we share more and more and talk less and less.

WhatsApp is the chief offender, I feel. There is much chatter and noise, but no real conversations. We have become a species of forwards. We hide our emptiness behind borrowed self-help thoughts, the latest meme/trope, strident fascistic political views, videos and jokes. There is no depth, emotion, vulnerability or empathy. There is no give and take, no comforting or challenging. Days are full of pings, but of no real connect.

And in real life, nobody has the time to sit up all night talking. Where we are running and why are we running so fast?

The scariest part of all this isolation is another burgeoning phenomenon of people who have forgotten how to have conversations! There are no dialogues any more—only multiple monologues.

Off late, I’ve been experiencing bizarre group situations where there are multiple overlapping monologues going at a steady stream. Everybody is talking, nobody is listening. It’s like sitting in the middle of a conversational zombie convention!

I also find the need for alcohol to fuel conversations weird. When and where did we lose the ability to be ourselves when sober? Why do honesty, openness, tolerance and friendliness need a formal setting or a lubricant? When did they get replaced with pretensions, catching up with the Joneses, and consumerist displays on steroids? What have we done to ourselves?

I think we are in an age of crisis. And we need to cure ourselves of this malaise, quickly. Before the aliens or AI take over.

Sherry Turkle in the New York Times says, “Conversation is there for us to reclaim. For the failing connections of our digital world, it is the talking cure.”

Perhaps we should declare a “World Conversation Day”—every month. On that day, we switch off our smart devices and other intrusions and sit down with our friends, acquaintances, strangers at the museum. And talk. Talk shit.

I’m always on for a conversation. Bring me poetry (Tamil, English, Hindi—in that order), information on aliens, knowledge of history, insights on spirituality or stories of nature. Hook me, fascinate me, and challenge me. I would return the gesture. I might even be coaxed to hand over my next bonus for a particularly nice turn of phrase. If you throw in a sizzling brownie with hot chocolate sauce, I might even take a bullet for you.