Conversations with total strangers

Conversations with total strangers

With the rise of personal devices, these machines are ubiquitous and seem to have sneaked their way into every aspect our our lives. Except the hours we sleep, their persistent presence make us their slaves. Whether checking mails, putting up selfies, notifying the world about where we have been, what we have seen or eaten and who all we have met, they rule our lives.

With the phone constantly badgering our attention and overwhelming our senses, real conversations are becoming rarer, and would perhaps become extinct soon. The casual conversation with strangers, with growing paranoia, does not happen anymore.

It was a pleasant surprise when the distinguished looking gentleman, with a lady of obvious European descent, sitting at the next table in one of the reputed hotels on the Marine Drive, Mumbai for breakfast, smiles at me and asks, "Are you from here or travelling for business?"

The gentleman was wearing a khadi waistcoat (bundee), casual Kurta and churidaar and chappals. The lady was wearing a modest trouser suit. When he spoke to her, cutting through the mild east coast accent, I thought there was this western India accent- Rajasthan or Gujarat? With the lady, obviously the wife, as she was ordering his breakfast with the implicit authority that only wives exhibit. Well I said to myself, "He would be in his middle-70s and she in to her late-60s at least; he would have made his way to the US of A in the early 1970s to do his masters, and stayed back. His chappals were a dead giveaway. It was his small gesture of reasserting his roots."

It turned out he was a rather well known artist, Gujarati by birth, had gone to USA in 1962 for his masters in fine arts from Pennsylvania. Later did I find out that his paintings adorned Guggenheim and many famous art museums, private and corporate collections including Exxon, Volvo etc. He was indeed world famous!

They both proved me wrong, he was 83 and she was 77! He spoke of the need for sponsoring arts and imbibing the sense of arts and appreciating our old history of art and culture among Indian youth. He lamented how religion was destroying the basic tenet of universal brotherhood. He wandered off to explain how there were scientific evidence of genetic traits of the inhabitants of a village in Tamil Nadu were identical with those in a village in Africa; how similar were the architectural designs from the Mayan civilisation with the designs of the master architect Maya (Ravana' father-in-law, planner of Lanka of Ramayana and also that of Indraprastha mentioned in Mahabharata)! The conversation meandered to art, culture and conversations. He lamented the fact that we do not realise that life is so short and still people do not talk to each other and shirk spread goodwill and love and affection through simple conversation! I had catching up to do with reading the voluminous documents for a board meeting and he had appointments to keep at the nearby art gallery where his work was being exhibited. So we parted as friends.

Inspired by his advocacy for conversations with total strangers, I went out for a smoke. I saw an obviously middle age European couple sitting on steps and smoking. He had lurid tattoos on his rather burly arms. I sat down next to the gentleman and politely asked him about his tattoos, and whether they were painful when being created. The gentleman smiled disarmingly and said they indeed were quite painful and that he had them done when he was fifteen. They had taken a full week of being under the needle and he had lived with them ever since. They were in India for seventeen days on a trip of a lifetime, visited Delhi, Jaipur, Varanasi and Mumbai was their last port of call and this was their last day in India.They were from Manchester and he had been a postman and delivery driver for his entire life. I confessed that I had always dreamt of getting a tattoo, however small and definitely not lurid, but never could screw up enough courage! He said that their visit to Varanasi was a mind blowing experience and he would never forget it.So ended my morning with conversations with two sets of complete strangers, whom I may never meet again, but strangely I am filled with a sense of joy of living and connecting with other human beings and enriched for it!