Small Talk on Long Journeys

I have just come back from a fortnight long break that involved more than 50 hours of travel by trains. Of these 50 hours about 45 of them were solo-travel. A new revelation of this experience is that small talk has changed on Indian trains! And how that change gladdens me! I need not be an anti-social traveller anymore!

I travelled solo on a train after a fairly long time. The first time I did that was at the age of 15, long ago. Travelling solo remained the norm for almost as many years after that first instance. In the recent past a great deal of travelling happened with members of my family or occassionally with friends. When with family or with friend(s), you talk among yourselves. There is a familiarity and an intimacy in that sort of conversation. Even though it is in a public space, the conversation is quite often about intimate matters like health, food preferences, relationships, gossip about people we know in common and in Indian trains it can easily extend to casual discussions on religio-philosophical matters such as fate, destiny, luck and quasi-logical solutions to deeply personal situations. My participation in these conversations has mostly been as a listener. Until it just gets too much to take and I snap or disconnect. Neither of those are polite in public. Therefore, my fail-safe solution to these situations has been to catch up on my leisure reading. I realise that my family and friends have been rather generous with me. They let me be. That means they let me read, mostly undisturbed. They are usually fine with me hiding behind a book.

The notorious Indian Aunty ji and the less infamous but often more curious Indian Uncle ji are not family and friends. They will ask you questions. They will want to know why one is travelling alone. They will want to figure out details like age, work life and even want clarity on one's marital status. From the ages of 15 to 30, when I travelled alone, they would inevitably be shocked that I was alone on a train journey. Whether it was as short as 6 hours or as long as 24 hours the surprising factor was that a young girl-woman was travelling alone. Questions would pour thick and fast. Am I a boarding schoolgirl? Where were my parents? Are they together? Oh they are!!! Then why isn't one of them accompanying me. The reactions ranged from pity to admiration-- Oh you poor neglected girl to Such a brave girl. I was neither of those. I was just a normal person who was brought by two sensible people who trusted my ability to take care of myself. But how was I to explain that to strangers? Especially strangers who were much older than me. And ones I might never ever meet again. 

When my solution of reading failed, because they would ignore the book hiding my face and would start a conversation with the usual question on my destination, I would have to place my book-sheild down and try my best to be social. Quite soon I realised that three conversation points stood me in good stead for any number of hours of shared journeys with strangers: Bollywood, Cricket and Politics. 

As a teenager and young adult, I had a shocking amount of knowledge of all three. This knowledge wasn't specifically cultivated for train journeys. It was just acquired by reading the newspaper every day. By the time I got the right to vote, I realised I had better not discuss politics on train journeys. People can get passionate about it. Opinions can lead to verbal fights. There was no knowing when a verbal fight can morph into a physical one. 

I went back to reading. I happily allowed people to think I was diligently preparing for exams during many train journeys. It worked well because I often covered my books with white paper covers. That was mostly to ensure that the cover wouldn't soil. But it helped me bat away inquisitive co-travellers. One such memorable journey led to my reading all of Gone with the Wind undisturbed on a 30 hour train journey. 

This time I picked up Yuval Noah Harrari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. I didn't have the time to cover it and the wear and tear is sadly showing now. Just the size seems to have stood me in good stead for about 45 hours of the 50 hours on two trains. In the last 5 hours two interesting things happened. The last one was the realisation that now I could be easily mistaken for one of those Indian Auntyji's. I was actually called one by a twenty-something BPO-KPO employee who was travelling back from her Diwali break and got into the wrong train. She confidentlyb walked in and occupied the seat in front of me. Within minutes her mother called to ask her whether she was on the right train because the lady heard the train being announced as she was leaving the railway station after seeing off her bright young daughter. She assured her mother that she indeed was on the right one and that those announcements about the train were going on for a bit. Soon a young man came to claim that seat. Just that moment she got another call, this time from her brother, informing her that she was actually in the wrong train. This girl looked at me with panic-stricken eyes and said: "Aunty ji, do you know the train number of this train? Or its name? Does it stop at ---?" I happily played the stereotype of the dumb middle-aged woman she had taken me for and told her to ask the person in blue, just beyond the door, for he was a railway employee. She quickly realised that she can catch the right train at the next stop in about 20 minutes. And spent those on a series of phone calls-- assuring her mother she got this; bullying the latter into helping her dodge her father's wrath; laughing about it with her brother and dramatising the entire situation to convince a workmate about her adventurous spirit.

There, you see, I am the Gen Z version of the Indian Aunty ji! I hear one side of phone conversations and figure out a personality!

Being Gen X myself, technology is very much part of me. My brain too is no longer one that I had in the 90s and early noughts, where I could focus on a book to such an extent that I can, decades later, easily find the page on which I read lines that stayed with me in Margaret Mitchell or J D Salinger. Harrari's words had lost out to the live drama unfolding a foot away from me. 

About an hour before this girl came into the scene, my brief co-traveller was a would-be Aunty ji millenial who wanted to know more about the book I was reading. I had an interesting conversation about Harrari's theory, evolution, Eurocentrism, festivals, family, temple darshans, celebrations, global tech and AI for about half an hour with this just about thirtyish charmingly social woman who works as an IT professional. That was a rapid fire list of topics to run through in less than half an hour. Very millenial. Very techy. Very touch and go. Quite a learning experience on twenty-first century small talk. 

But the one that gladdened my heart was one that I caught as a passive listener after dinner-time and before the lights were turned off. It was between two sets of co-travellers. The first one was an NRI couple who were returning to their native town after a pilgrimmage and were clearly experiencing an Indian train journey after decades. The other set were tradesmen who seemed to be friends and business-partners on a work trip. Neither set seemed even remotely interested in the erstwhile favourite neutral topics of Cricket and Bollywood. Understandably. All of them were in the 50 to 60 age range. Their favourite sporting heroes and film actors must all be retired people now. The big surprise was that they started out with testing the ground on politics. They didn't seem to disagree at all. Naturally it fizzled out within minutes. Then they had a good hour-long conversation on travel! A brand new topic! An unlikely topic for a pilgrim couple and a couple of tradesmen to find a mutual interest in. It concluded on a happy note with one of those middle-aged tradesmen with a heavy hint of rural influence to his Hindi declaring in a wistful tone that he will someday go with his wife to see the Ellora caves for he found them quite spectacular!

Ah!  A brave new world! One in which people talk of sight-seeing as small talk on Indian trains. And also include homebound wives in their dreams of leisure travel to appreciate cultural heritage. 

Time for me to keep aside those thick books on train travels and learn to be more social with my co-travellers. I might learn about new places and also about new kinds of hopes and dreams that people around me seem to be sharing with strangers. 

The Personal in Public

I have come back to this space after a very long time. It has been left alone so long that I don't know whether it has stayed a public space anymore. That is the most important reason for my coming back to this space -- to express myself and to clarify my thoughts on the personal in public. It provides me space to type out my confusions on communicating personal anxieties in public spaces and it is a space which blurs the public and the personal in its very conception.
I remember starting this blog when I was utterly amused at watching someone talk animatedly on a mobile phone which was hidden from sight. The first post in this blog records my thoughts and impressions of that experience. It looked like this person was inhabiting a completely different space while we were actually sharing a rather cramped physical space -- a lift in an old government building!
I was amazed at the ease with which the public space was being personalised by this co-rider in the elevator. There was no thought given to the reactions of the neighbours, for the neighbours did not really exist. I think the last decade has made that mode of communication so pervasive that the most well-adjusted person blanks out her surroundings, invisibilises her immediate neighbours and inhabits mind spaces which are miles away from the physical space she is occupying. She doesn't have to worry about hurting her neighbors. For her neighbors don't exist. Not really. Not for her to connect with that moment.
In my childhood, one of the crucial tasks I had to learn in 'civilising' myslef into society was to understand that my words and actions can cause emotional hurt just as much as they cause physical ones. Part two of that lesson made me aware of the spaces in which liberty to hurt can be taken and the extent to which that liberty can be taken. You can sometimes say or do things which may cause some form of hurt to immediate family but you should stop yourself from doing that to people outside your family; of course, family can also mean friends who become family. If you do, it is called a tantrum. And tantrums are bad. I suspect this lesson is not part of upbringing anymore; especially because even adults have forgotten it.
Nowadays, even newspapers regularly carry features in which personal hurt is expressed in public spaces. Any why should they not? After all, there are any number of blogs which do that and are among the most popular ones in cyberspace. Also, reality television probably has the maximum viewership in the world governed by TRP ratings. However, when I had begun reading newspapers, in high school, those personal features reminded me of my grandfather. I imagined  V. Gangadhar as a contemporary of my grandfather. As it turns out R V Smith actually is! They can write rambling reminisces with mild doses of humour and the reader will indulge them just as all good-mannered children listen to a story Grandfather is repeating the thirtieth time. Feature articles were light reading, along with film and food reviews. They were spaces for the reader and the newspaper to relax.
Having said that, there is a serious danger of a feature article, even a film review, getting spoilt when the personal comes in. I do not mean the destruction caused by prejudices, I mean the destruction caused by grief. Case in point is the latest by my favourite film critic, Baradwaj Rangan. Do compare this one with that one Quite often, I reserve Rangan's article for the last on Sunday mornings, the best for the end. I like his critical engagement with cinema, his style peppered with mild humour and the ease with which he displays innocuous disapproval. The former of the two articles referred above had none of those. It thoroughly alienated all readers who are not extremely well-versed with Tamil cinema and its use of Carnatic music. If I knew the man, I would have called him to say -- Listen, it is alright to mourn.  With people whom you trust. Even when you are mourning the death of a public figure do you trust the public to mourn with you? For, the first recollection the article brought up was a call during rush hour in Bombay from someone very dear to me saying in an uncharacteristically flat and grim tone, "Listen, something has happened. It seems Michael Jackson died last night." Immediately I knew the loss he experienced with that death. It was the loss of the person who showed the capacity of the human body to create beauty. It was the loss of the man who drowned the noises in our head with his music when we were growing up. This person's friends and family who understood his loss called him to pay condolences till late evening that day. There was some form of closure to that loss, while mourning with near and dear ones. Obituaries are feature articles which mark the public end of an era; they hardly provide closure to an emotional loss to the writer of the obituary. Unless there is some distance already traversed in the lessening of emotional investment in the relationship.
One of the best contemporary writers of features seem to have blurred the difference between personal grief and public marking of the end of an era, in one of the best mainstream newspapers today. This should indicate that modes of communication are changing. The personal can be brought into the public and it is being brought for the public's notice. Spaces like this -- blogs -- started this and the trend is making inroads into newspapers of record. We witness displays of this trend in academia nowadays. In conversations -- personal, semi-official or official -- we are smoothly blurring the distinction between personal hurt and public grievance. And we are hurting and getting hurt in the process. Some recent events at work let to intense, emotionally charged exchanges over email, phone calls and a public meeting of a collective of thinking individuals. One of the emails sent to a large group at work started with a brilliant use of the first paragraph of Sudhir Kakar's autobiography. I interpreted it as the attempt to tread the razor's edge between denial and drowning in loss. Kakar had no choice but to work towards learning to walk on that razor's edge. His dead father will not come back. There is no alternative. He has to show the "courage of helplessness".
We were surely not at a funeral in our workspace. Our loss is not a permanent one. It is an instance of loss of perspectives on who we thought we are and who we think we should be. If it is not permanent it can be resolved. Probably through good communication. We might have to adapt the new ways of communication, the ones in which the personal and public get interspersed. That does not mean we cannot learn to do it without hurting ourselves. After all, we know as teachers that we are perpetual students too. If we have to lean this new trick, I am sure we can. At least, I mean to start. And that is why I am back in this space which blurs the personal and the public.