Conversations with my Grandmother (Paati )
The art of conversation lies in knowing when to stay silent, it’s all about the pauses and the right questions. I am 28 years of which the last 1.5 years have been in a pandemic which has given me the perfect opportunity to lock myself up and reflect on all kinds of thoughts. The person I have talked to most this year has been me. And I have understood conversations are not easy to have. Of all the people I have met in my life, there is one lady who stands apart from the crowd when it comes to holding conversations. It is my grandmother (Paati in Tamil )
Most people in my generation suffer from a severe case of attention deficiency thanks to the mobile phone. I test this theory (After piloting on my husband) in a simple way. When people are too into their phones, they give mono-syllabic auto-responses, slowly I realised they are not even listening, I slip in the most ridiculous stuff from time to time, and mostly I don’t get caught, either I am saying ridiculous stuff all the time or they have zoned me out.
How many times have we spilt milk?
At times I feel my generation is incapable of boiling milk, we want to use our phones in the time span it takes to boil milk, and most likely end up mopping the spilt milk. In the 20 years I stayed at home never once did my Paati ever be around milk and boil it to the point where it was all over the kitchen counter
Cats taking Over our Conversations
The phone has become as essential as water when it comes to visiting the loo. There is a wide variety of mindless content to choose from since it’s the loo and one might prefer entertainment over intellectual engagement. Personally, I find the cat videos on social media to be super addictive, if cats knew how much they were controlling social media, they would not care because they are cats
So given I am competing with a cat/ travel locations/ food videos/ funny Videos on Instagram, and my limited capability to crack jokes around people who do not react I have slowly stopped having conversations that go beyond the mundane.
But when I am with my Paati I time travel to an age uninterrupted by Social Media and discuss everything under the sun. My Paati is the queen of sarcasm and calls a spade a spade.
When I was working from home she asked me what was it that I did on my screen all day. She was curious about my plant-based diet and why I chose to give up milk. She also taught me a few tips and tricks in the art of conversation.
She uses diplomacy in order to do what she wants without hurting anyone, she uses sarcasm to avoid getting hurt. As a generation given how Social Media validates our every thought, we are much more opinionated than the older generations. While I love the fact social media offers a point of view into things unknown, it also takes away attention span that might have otherwise been reserved for face to face conversations
A lot of my friends and I are too quick to react, we prefer sticking to our opinions and are even ready to lose friendships if it means sticking to what we believe. My Paati sticks to her beliefs but she has learnt the clever art of balancing relationships with values. She never encourages too much ranting or complaining. Her approach is that life has to go on, and brooding gets in the way of a happy living. I know we live in times where we are told it's okay to take a break, pause and reflect, and prioritise our mental health. But we are overstimulated by all the Media and noise around us, and it is almost impossible to take a break when most of our jobs have become about staying online all the time.
There is nothing that happens in daily lives except for work and watching TV shows, the post-pandemic world gives limited avenues to go out and meet new people or meet old ones who can rekindle conversations. And looking at the news feels like jumping into a fire pit, everything seems to be breaking, and social media ensures that one does not escape from a burning world.
In my 28-year existence, the first 16 seem to be blurred, the last half-decade has been about working and trying to be as busy as possible. By the time life started peaking up and offering choices to live like I wanted to, the pandemic had struck. All of my friends are in the same boat, we either talk about work or things happening on the internet. I find older folks (Ones who can hold a good conversation) interesting to talk to. They simply have a richer history. Take my Paati, for instance, she has lived perilously close to poverty in a joint family that had 10 children and 6 adults. She lived at a time where conversations were the only form of entertainment, she has seen my country before independence, at war and after independence, she left her hometown, came to a new place where she did not know the language, learnt everything from scratch and has now blended beautifully into the society.
Conversations can be healing if one can be open, a key to being open I realised is not taking things too seriously, this is different from not caring about issues close to one’s heart. It’s being open to criticism and opposition of views and using dialogue and humour to bridge the gap. It’s a delicate balance between having someone’s attention and working towards something we believe in.
Key to having good Conversations
My Paati and I do not take each other seriously, it is the perfect relationship to have, there is no adult or child, we are two friends who are generations apart and she also happens to be my grandmother.
We live in turbulent times, but conversations with older generations take us back to a time when folks survived against all odds because they had a community to fall back on, with Social Media cutting the chords to community and making us more isolated, it feels nice to be speaking to someone who is not from the internet era and who has seen a lot more of the world and mastered the art of not taking life too seriously
