I FIND YOU BORING - PART ONE

Sometimes in life you end up meeting people whom you long to have a conversation with. Long to smile at, laugh with and share ideas and beliefs. So first you start with those ‘looks’ along corridors, canteens or bus-stops. Once you know for sure that the other person knows you exist, you proceed to tentative smiles, quickly look aside turning to the person next to you as if absorbed into some deep conversation that you are apparently carrying out with them. Yet, mostly abstracted, you pay scant attention to the conversation and through the corner of your eye watch the person as they pass by. After this routine gets established you accompany the smile with a ‘hi’. That would be the point where you know you could start to call the person an acquaintance and probably a friend.

Slowly as weeks drift by, you start to exchange pleasantries and then phone numbers. On reaching this juncture, you feel a dart of pleasure go through you. You say to yourself, at last we can be friends. (This Para comes with the statutory warning that until here you come from a rather cloistered environment where ready smiles and speeches in the absence of introduction would in all likelihood brand you a flirt even though all you desired was friendship! If you directly reached the final stage please skip to the second Para treating the first as quite invisible.)

After such a promising beginning, where the seeds of friendship were well planted and nurtured by you, you would expect the friendship to blossom into something –special. But have you noticed that not all friendships which start exceedingly well proceed with all the smoothness you expect of it. I do not refer to rough rides. Friendship without argument would be like eating nothing but sweets for your meal. Beyond a point it makes you want to puke. I refer to 'conversation'. The connection between minds. The sharing of ideals, beliefs or probably even the most mundane occurrences in your daily life ( irrespective of whether you agree or disagree). They portray the signs of a good friendship, if not superlative.

Yet there are a few friendships in which you struggle for conversation. You desperately hunt in the deepest crevices of your mind, hoping to find things to say, cover those blanks that enter in the conversation. Deep inside you wonder, ‘Am I boring the other person? Does she/he think I am tedious?’. Stop. The overused cliché states ‘It takes two hands to clap’. Reality states that it takes two people to make an interesting conversation. Start thinking. Does not the fact that you struggle for words to fill the occasion suggest that the other person is filling it no better? Does not the fact that you find the conversation unsatisfying imply that neither is the other person succeeding in keeping YOU riveted? So ask yourself when you face this.

Am I really boring or is the other person boring me?