Monday, June 19, 2006
Catch 22
Winter of 2002 – Indore – Bhutani and I were sitting in a café. Those were the times when Amrita was in Indore, and Bhutani used to come down to Indore almost every month to meet her. We were waiting for her to come, Bhutani more anxiously than me. Although, it was only fifteen minutes that she made us wait, Bhutani had already called twice, although we might have reached there ten minutes before time.
Amrita came there – beamed and waved for Bhutani to see her. Bhutani introduced us to each other – although we all knew that we were the only three people who were supposed to be meeting there and that we knew each other by name. She smiled and said hi – looking towards me, and in a little formal way. Bhutani went to the counter to order a few things we would while we talk.
I asked Amrita about her college, about her plans on marriage and life in general. This lasted for around five minutes. Then she did the same thing – asked me all sorts of questions, and it lasted for another five minutes. The conversation was over. We had run out of ammunition. I started to look around at the other tables and she started to play and fiddle with the mobile. The moments were just speechless, both of us feeling the same shyness and the anxiousness of meeting a semi-stranger and being forced to talk. The next five minutes we spent there were somewhat different, each of us trying to look in different directions, not being able to put forth a new topic. The new topic could have been anything – weather being the most common one people generally start with. The things were all standstill on our table, a lasting silence engulfed the air we were sharing. Breaking knuckles was the only thing, which was killing time. Bhutani was busy at the cashier. He was waiting for the coffee. Two years later, I happened to meet Amrita again in Pune. This time it was very different. The uneasy air had evaporated.
The incident doesn’t hold anything special for both of us; we had made a new friend each. What happened at the café was no different than what it is when a boy goes to a girl’s house to propose her – the same speechlessness, the same anxiety, the same awkwardness to a certain extent, and the same feeling of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. We might have felt the first one many a times and seen the second one in the movies ‘n’ number of times. The scenes are same; both the places the people are just trying to cross the other person’s circle of influence – the circle where people can influence your thought process.
The outermost circle can be the circle of acquaintance, the circle when you know the person by face and fact. The circle consists of those people whom you see everyday in the elevator, on the road and say hi and hello and keep moving. Anybody lying beyond this circle is a stranger. The people lying inside this circle are just those who would be called friends, the friendship circle. I need not explain this one. When the friends start sharing the emotions, the thoughts and the problems, they come into our circle of most influential people. We can keep the family out of this because family is what we get when we come into this world, but friends are made by us.
When you come to know that you are one person who lies inside a certain person’s innermost circle, then you are taking a big responsibility and your actions, words and thoughts might have the power to change that person’s life. So just think before you speak, and when you do so, you come back to the state when you first began – the uneasy silence of words surrounding you.
Amrita came there – beamed and waved for Bhutani to see her. Bhutani introduced us to each other – although we all knew that we were the only three people who were supposed to be meeting there and that we knew each other by name. She smiled and said hi – looking towards me, and in a little formal way. Bhutani went to the counter to order a few things we would while we talk.
I asked Amrita about her college, about her plans on marriage and life in general. This lasted for around five minutes. Then she did the same thing – asked me all sorts of questions, and it lasted for another five minutes. The conversation was over. We had run out of ammunition. I started to look around at the other tables and she started to play and fiddle with the mobile. The moments were just speechless, both of us feeling the same shyness and the anxiousness of meeting a semi-stranger and being forced to talk. The next five minutes we spent there were somewhat different, each of us trying to look in different directions, not being able to put forth a new topic. The new topic could have been anything – weather being the most common one people generally start with. The things were all standstill on our table, a lasting silence engulfed the air we were sharing. Breaking knuckles was the only thing, which was killing time. Bhutani was busy at the cashier. He was waiting for the coffee. Two years later, I happened to meet Amrita again in Pune. This time it was very different. The uneasy air had evaporated.
The incident doesn’t hold anything special for both of us; we had made a new friend each. What happened at the café was no different than what it is when a boy goes to a girl’s house to propose her – the same speechlessness, the same anxiety, the same awkwardness to a certain extent, and the same feeling of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. We might have felt the first one many a times and seen the second one in the movies ‘n’ number of times. The scenes are same; both the places the people are just trying to cross the other person’s circle of influence – the circle where people can influence your thought process.
The outermost circle can be the circle of acquaintance, the circle when you know the person by face and fact. The circle consists of those people whom you see everyday in the elevator, on the road and say hi and hello and keep moving. Anybody lying beyond this circle is a stranger. The people lying inside this circle are just those who would be called friends, the friendship circle. I need not explain this one. When the friends start sharing the emotions, the thoughts and the problems, they come into our circle of most influential people. We can keep the family out of this because family is what we get when we come into this world, but friends are made by us.
When you come to know that you are one person who lies inside a certain person’s innermost circle, then you are taking a big responsibility and your actions, words and thoughts might have the power to change that person’s life. So just think before you speak, and when you do so, you come back to the state when you first began – the uneasy silence of words surrounding you.
