Am I boring you?

I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I quite enjoy picking up a conversation with complete strangers. This could happen just about anywhere. Mind you, not every stranger you broach is likely to return the compliment, but you press on regardless. If your target, if that is the word I want, is reticent you take the hint and try your luck elsewhere. If you don’t take the hint and pursue, on your head be it. The waiting room at a doctor’s or a dentist’s chamber is usually an excellent place to get fraternal. A typical scenario can go something like this.

The man sitting next to me was absorbed in a paperback. I peered at the cover and took first strike.

‘Good morning, nice book you’re reading. P.D. James. Big fan. Big, big fan. One of my favourite fictional detectives, Adam Dalgliesh.’ That was a good opening, I thought.

‘Yes, I am reading it, and would like to continue reading it without being interrupted. If you don’t mind.’ I thought I detected an incipient frost in the gentleman’s response. Rather than reading the signal, I persisted.

‘The Black Tower, eh? One of her best and that is saying something. I shan’t spoil it for you and reveal the ending. This much I can tell you. It was not the butler that did it.’ I smiled broadly at my own, time-worn cliché. I was just trying to be convivial. He didn’t see the funny side of it. He got up and pointedly moved to another seat at the far end of the room. I raised my voice and called after him.

‘You must watch the television serial. Roy Marsden is brilliant as Dalgliesh.’ The duty nurse walked up to me and asked me to remain silent. I tried telling her that I was just working off my nervousness, what with the doctor’s consult to discuss the worrying swelling in my throat and trying to be friendly. She repeated her instruction, curtly this time, to keep quiet and not further aggravate my throat condition. I told her to watch Tony Hancock in The Blood Donor. She handed me a very old, dog-eared issue of India Today lying on the table. The cover story was ‘Finance Minister Manmohan Singh presents the Budget.’ That was how old it was!

Another place where you wait for long periods is at the airport departure lounge. Pretty much every single person is fiddling with his or her mobile phone. Even those reading a book are doing so out of their mobile Kindle app. Others are keeping themselves busy watching Tik Tok or taking selfies of themselves and posting the results on Facebook or Instagram. ‘Hi Mom, flight slightly delayed but we should be boarding soon. Love you.’ Accompanied by several red hearts. Mind you, the message could also easily be, ‘Hi Mom, biting into this gooey chocolate doughnut, yum-yum. Love you.’ Accompanied by more red hearts and other indistinguishable emoticons, smileys, memes etc. Such is the intellectual pressure of these video cons that one can barely keep up. On one such occasion, I turned to a teenage girl sitting next to me and asked her how many hours in a day does she spend on her mobile.

‘I am not sure Uncle, let me see.’ She then closed her eyes and went mutter, mutter to herself, presumably calculating her daily routine and declared brightly, ‘If you take out the ten hours of sleep, I could be on the mobile for at least nine hours daily.’

‘Good God, you sleep for ten hours? What about waking up for school or college? Have you heard of Kumbhakarna from the Ramayana? No, of course not. It would have been epic if you had! Go ask Google Gemini.’ My sarcasm escaped her completely.

 ‘Anyhow, you will have to switch off your mobile once we are airborne,’ I concluded with a wry chuckle.

She was equal to it. ‘Uncle, I don’t crash before one in the morning, so I need my beauty sleep, never mind your Kumba whoever he is or was. I am done with college and I work from home, mostly networking. As for being airborne, I will turn my mobile on to flight mode and binge watch Friends. For the nth time. So, it’s all cool.’ She spoke at such a rapid-fire speed that I could have done with subtitles! At which point, I turned on my mobile to check my email and WhatsApp messages. And browse a bit on YouTube. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Incidentally, I felt her employment of the word ‘crash,’ even as a shorthand for ‘sleep’ was unfortunate, seeing as we were about to take off shortly!

Then we have a situation where an almost unknown person at a departmental store approaches you with an uncertain smile. Too late to duck, followed by that old, familiar line. ‘Haven’t we met before?’

‘No, I don’t think so. You must be confusing me with someone else. Sorry, must rush.’ Of course, I knew the blighter. Met him last several years ago somewhere and had no wish to renew acquaintance. A real pain, he tried to interest me in some financial instruments for investment. Eminently avoidable. I then tried to push my trolley past him to reach for a brand of salad dressing, but he wasn’t having any. Stood right in front and wouldn’t budge.

He was persistent, I’ll give him that. ‘Tell you what, why don’t we meet at the coffee shop after you’ve finished here. You will not believe the kind of schemes I have to offer. What say you?’ I was sure it was some Ponzi scheme or the other calculated to erode my meagre savings dramatically while increasing his. Scheming would be a good epithet to describe him.

‘Some other time, if you don’t mind. I have guests coming for dinner and the cook can’t wait. Bye bye.’ Just then, fortuitously, he had to attend to his mobile and I made good my escape to the billing counter. As fast as my legs and my trolley would take me.

The one person you want to avoid at all costs, but almost impossible to shake off is the bore who will talk endlessly regardless of how many times you pointedly glance at your watch anxiously or try to catch the attention of an imaginary friend somewhere in the middle distance. The bore is made of sterner stuff. Not for nothing did Oscar Wilde define this pestilential nuisance thus, ‘A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.’ You can come across such a person almost anywhere. I was sitting next to a young man at my bank waiting for the teller to call my token number. It was a long queue so we struck up a conversation, mostly one-way traffic. I took first strike.

‘Hullo young man, how often do you visit the bank?’ A harmless way to open a civil conversation, you would have thought.

‘What is it to you, old man?’ riposted the cheeky, young thing, removing his iPhone earpiece.

The ‘old man’ nomenclature stung, but I did not let it show. ‘Distinguished grey hair’ is greatly overrated. ‘Nothing, just making friendly conversation, but if you are not in the mood…’

He cut me in mid-sentence. ‘Purleez Uncle, don’t be such a bore. Can’t you see I am on a group chat?’

That was it. I had had my fill of this brat. I could have told him civility costs nothing, but that would have gone clean over his head. I decided to shut up, preserve my dignity and move to another seat. He called me a bore; the unkindest cut of all. I have never been accused of being a bore. The joke was clearly on me. Only I was not laughing. Once you start being addressed as ‘Uncle,’ you know it is a slippery slope. How did that Bee Gees song go? I started a joke which started the whole world crying / But I didn’t see that the joke was on me oh no / I started to cry which started the whole world laughing / Oh If I’d only seen that the joke was on me.

Acta est fabula, plaudite!