Skip to main content

The Art of Conversation


It usually starts off well. What is your name? Where are you from What are you doing here? How long have you been here? Why did you choose to come here?

And then it hits a brick wall. The awkward silence. Everyone reaches for their drink and takes a long gulp of beer, hoping alcohol will provide some inspiration for the next question. OR they take out their handphone and check their messages, because you know, they are people of significance and nothing justifies physical absence better than busyness. These silences seem to become more apparent and increase in frequency as I grow older. I cannot seem to put a finger to why this happens.

One thing that I have noticed though is a complete lack of curiosity in people, an unwillingness or even a shyness to pose questions. For example, there was once a female friend whom I used to converse via email when she was overseas, conversation where we allowed us to openly speak our minds about everything in life. By the time she got back to Singapore, I had pretty much earmarked her as a potential girlfriend and it was not soon before we went out. However, during these outings, I felt something was missing. It took multiple dates, but I eventually got around to it.

She simply did not ask any questions.

While she had led an eventful and well-travelled life, which she was more than happy to share with me, she did not ask anything back. Me being me, eager to exaggerate my pathetically boring life, would sit there desperately trying to form the next question. All the while hoping she would just ask me, ‘How I was doing?’, a question that never came. Eventually, I figured it was better just to move on from her.

It astounds me why this is happening. Some thinkers point it to growth of smartphones and how that deprives our ability to make a normal conversation with a person. I think it has something to do with one’s upbringing as well, particularly the dinner table. It was at the dinner table where my family was present every night that I unconsciously honed my conversational skills and it has often come as a surprise to me that many families rarely share a meal together on a regular basis. Also, I assume people are often reluctant too to ask the deeper questions, for fear of intruding the other person’s privacy and being rejected. It could also be that one is simply not interested in the people in the conversation. Or maybe culturally people are more silent in Singapore and parts of Europe. As I clearly remember, when I was in India, I would wish that people just shut up.

Which could very likely be what most Germans and Singaporeans think about me.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sparing the Rod

 She gave me a look of deep displeasure, not very atypical of the look most members of the opposite gender gave me. “You know you can’t do that in Germany?”, she asserted with the same authority my mother used to tell me about not messing around in her kitchen.  “Yes I am aware”, I meekly responded, knowing well that any kind of argument about this would not end well, so it was better to close off the topic quietly and unlike the kitchen, I could not afford to get kicked out of Germany. She was not the first to respond with such hostility to what seemed like the most natural of things in my experience. The last one who told me the same was a teacher I had met at a party. When she sounded shocked that I was ok with it and said it was not right, I (with some alcoholic courage) had retorted, “How would you discipline them then if they do something wrong?” “I would tell them I am very disappointed with them”. I almost laughed. However, that was very much the theory of my new frien...
Post a Comment
Read more

An Eye for an Eye

"Something that three or four years ago you told me was one of the touchstones of maturity: being nice to people even when they’re not nice to you…" - William Styron It was an plan that came out of nowhere. Perhaps half depressed by the winter and half depressed by the inactivity at work, there was sufficient turmoil in the mind to create these type of plans and then let it fester, until something that started off with a what-if turned into a why-not. It would have been the perfect revenge for the past hurt and humiliation that was yet to completely heal.  The circumstances were similar. On one side, an eager visitor who had traveled far to say "Hello" and on the other side, a host, bewildered and surprised by this visit. In the first case, the host would not receive the visitor, who would turn back humiliated and vowing never again. Now the roles were reversed and I was the host. What if I agreed to receive? What if in reality I did not plan to receive? ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Passage to Vietnam : Part 2 - The Food

Imagine your friend passes you a fully boiled egg, garnished in onion and sauce. You use your chopsticks, lift it up to your mouth and bite of half the egg. It does not tear away as easily as you thought it would. And it tastes queer. Then while chewing away at that half, you look down at the other half on your plate and you see tiny grey feathers and a tiny leg bone staring back at you. My exact feeling at that moment was like I was making love to a woman and she suddenly reveals in the middle that she used to be a man. In short, I wanted to puke. I am not a big fan of Vietnamese cuisine. During my 18 days stay there, my Viet friends were kind enough to bring me around and let me taste about every kind of street food and drink, from snails to sticky rice to Viet baguettes to local alcohol. Other than certain items here and there, I generally thought the food lacked any kind of strong flavour to it. Plus, for some reason, I could not understand why the Viets went to the extent of ea...
Post a Comment
Read more