SILENT CHATTER

Is conversation a dying art? With email, 280character tweets and quick Facebook posts dominating our daily exchanges, what happened to good, oldfashioned talking?

“…And Mary, at the end of a long concerto, was glad to purchase praise and gratitude by Scotch and Irish airs, at the request of her younger sisters, who, with some of the Lucases and two or three officers, joined eagerly in dancing at one end of the room.

Mr Darcy stood near them in silent indignation at such a mode of passing the evening, to the exclusion of all conversation…”

The year was 1989-90. A young Amit Chaudhuri met fellow student Peter McDonald at Oxford and both unhappy where they were, discovered an intellectual kinship through conversations. Years later, Chaudhuri, now an author, would acknowledge the importance of such a kinship by dedicating one of his books to Peter and other conversations. Cut to 2018, and one of the first things that Google throws up if you type conversations is the link to an instant messaging app.

It’s the stuff nostalgia is made of. Letter writing, diaries and journals, and to an extent, conversations – not the kind exchanged over social media platforms, but those that were, and sometimes continue to be, shared in the intimate and cosy space of one’s drawing room, college canteens, dormitories and common rooms, the neighbourhood tea stall and sometimes between strangers, in the unlikeliest of places, the lurching compartment of a train or at a bus stop.

Much has been written on the impact of the obsession with the virtual world on one’s real life relationships. The effect of sms/WhatsApp language on the writing skills of the youth has also been debated. But is the increased dependence on email, instant messages and 280-character social media posts, punctuated with emoticons, taking a toll on our skills of verbal exchange?

There can hardly be a simple yes or no answer, but a good look at those around us would indicate that the possibility of it happening is not remote. The paradox, as Gita Bamezai, head, department of communication research, Indian Institute of Mass Communication, points out, is that more people are conversing “with known and unknown people today than ever before, if we go by the number of Facebook users and Twitterati.” But she questions whether this online discourse has enriched the wayside, tea stall and drawing room conversations. “In many ways our face to face conversations have become prone to technological disruption,” she says.

COFFEE & CONVERSATIONS

The Bengalis call it adda, the French, tete-atete (though technically that is a private conversation only between two people). In Urdu it is guftagoo. But it all boils down to the same thing – a verbal exchange between people that is so much more than just plain communication. It could be high-brow or mundane or flirtatious, depending on one’s mood and company. And though singer Manna Dey’s Coffee House er shei adda ta aaj aar nei (the conversations at the Coffee House are no more) immortalises, at least for the Bengalis, the charm of the Calcutta Coffee House – the once-upon-a-time haunt of many intellectuals–for Indians tea has traditionally been the drink over which conversations buzzed.

It is in search of this that 28-year-old Delhibased journalist Malini Das (name changed on request) rushes to meet her friends every evening after work. “My companions are a motley group of people from across professions. There is a wide age range and we talk about everything, the possibilities are limitless. It is the quintessential Bangali adda that I had grown up seeing and hearing around me in Kolkata,” she says. But even as she lets tea and talk unwind her after the workday, she is aware that conversations around her are slowly being lost in silence. “Today, only 10 per cent of my friends still converse regularly. In my parents’ time, the figure would have been 90 per cent,” she rues.

TO SPEAK OR NOT TO SPEAK

In the 1970s-80s India, without the lure of a 200-channel offering cable television at home or the wonders of the world wide web at one’s fingertips, entertainment mostly meant socialising with one’s friends. Conversations were still as central to the gatherings as when Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813. “At festivals, or even otherwise, we would visit people more than we do now. And there would be a lot of conversations,” agrees Delhi-based author and translator Saba Mahmood Bashir. Films like Gol Maal (the original 1979 one starring Amol Palekar and not the modern Ajay Devgnstarrer franchisee), which show friends meeting to converse or indulge in music to while away the time, capture this perfectly.

“There always used to be that one person who could talk well – who was full of stories and a treat to listen to. It could be the roadside chaiwalla. And every town had that space that would act as the meeting place and encourage conversations – in Kolkata, for example, it was the para or neighbourhood. In Jamshedpur, it was the puliya or culvert, where people would converge for conversations,” says filmmaker Imtiaz Ali. Years later, glimpses of these people, the good conversationalists, surface in many of his films. They are there in Geet, the chatterbox protagonist of Jab We Met, and the autorickshaw driver in Tamasha.

In a December 2017 article in The Gaurdian, Elizabeth Stokoe, professor of social interaction in the UK, listed words and phrases that she felt had the power to turn the course of a conversation. She and her colleagues had analysed hours of recorded conversations, from customer services, mediation hotlines and police crisis negotiation. ‘‘We are pushed and pulled around by language far more than we realise,” Stoke had been quoted as saying in the article.

As author-parliamentarian Shashi Tharoor had stressed in a tweet in response to those who have routinely accused of using difficult language in his social media posts, “... The purpose of speaking or writing is to

In the past, conversation – particularly the adda – had a kind of innocence and adventure about it. The adda was eclectic and would chart a huge range of subjects, from the mundane to the intellectual, which you don’t have too much of in conversations today.

AMIT CHAUDHURI, writer