My attempts at improving conversations

I love to butt into conversations, observe and listen to discussions on assorted topics, where friends sit around and talk about whatever is on their minds, may be with a drink. What am I looking for in these small talks? When people get drunk, there is the thrill of getting a glimpse into their personal life and beliefs, hoping to learn something different. But I think what I am really listening for is connection. I do not feel like I am ever eavesdropping on real people as I participate, too, getting closer, closer to each other or closer to a conversational destination that they did not know they were headed for when they set out. Whether we are participating in them or listening to them, the goal is to forget about the outcome and just connect. 

My adult behaviour must have been shaped from my upbringing when younger; where there was love in our home but no expression. Whether it was nature or nurture, I grew into a person who was a bit of an introvert but I have learned something profound along the way. A lot of the time, I used to just stand on the side and observe people mostly making an idiot of themselves with shallow knowledge yet, I used to stay silent for fear of hurting their emotional availability to me or their joys. If you had met me 5 years out of medical college, I think you would have found me a pleasant enough guy, cheerful, but surely inhibited — somebody who was not easy to connect to. In truth, I was a practiced escape artist. If you revealed some vulnerable intimacy to me like any talk on sex, I was good at moving always discretely to make meaningful eye contact with your shoes and then excusing myself to go home as relatives were expected.

Life has a way of tenderizing you, though. Becoming a husband and then a father was an emotional revolution, of course. Later, I absorbed my share of the normal blows that any adult suffers - broken promises, personal failures, financial vulnerability and everything that comes with getting older. The ensuing sense of my own frailty as well as the shock of cancer detection was good for me, introducing me to deeper, repressed parts of myself. I learned that living in a detached way is a withdrawal from life, an estrangement not just from other people but also from yourself. I am no exceptional person, but I am an observant grower. I do have the ability to look at my shortcomings and then try to better myself by learning from the better ones to prod myself into becoming a more fully developed person.

Being openhearted is a prerequisite for being a full, kind and wise human being. But it is not enough. People need social skills. The real process of, say, building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete actions well: being curious about other people; disagreeing without poisoning relationships; revealing vulnerability at an appropriate pace; being a good listener; knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness; knowing how to host a gathering where everyone feels embraced; knowing how to see things from another’s point of view.

In any conversation, most people shoot the breeze for a while, before they descend and get immersed on to any one topic which is dissected threadbare and sometimes, as a postmortem. The tone of such discussions is always buoyant, full of comedic bits, at times good-natured teasing and at others reflecting hollowness. It is a fizzy soft drink feeling, fun and weird and straightforward enough to make lifelong friends or even enemies. It has made me listen to other people differently. But those who sprinkle warmth, humour and weird thinking with their repartee leave a significant impact. I did not care how long I had to go silent as I just wanted to keep listening and laughing along. And before I knew, with my years of voracious reading and hilarious experiences, I was drawn into conversations as an active participant. What makes a conversation interesting to take part is the same as what makes one interesting to listen to! My favourite conversations with friends, the ones in which I feel most connected, are sprawling, agenda free, even repetitive. They go on for hours and often fail to reach a coherent conclusion. But they have a key ingredient in common that I love: connection to suggest close presence, even after the conversation is long over. 

People want to connect but I see the results in the social clumsiness that I encounter too frequently. I estimate that only 30% of the people in the world are good question askers. The rest are nice people, but they just do not ask. I think it is because they have not been taught to and so do not display basic curiosity about others. Above almost any other need, human beings as social animals long to have another person look into their faces with love and acceptance. The issue is that we lack practical knowledge about how to give one another the attention we crave. Some days it seems like we have intentionally built a society that gives people little guidance on how to perform the most important activities of life.

People are not as clear as they think they are, and we’re not as good at listening as we think we are. Being a loud listener by continually responding to comments with encouraging affirmations, with “Oh, really,” “aha” and “yes” makes me better accepted. By asking: How did you come to believe that, I have learnt that it gets people talking about the folks and experiences that shaped their values. The quality of any conversation directly depends on the quality of the questions. Kids are phenomenal at asking big, direct questions. As adults, we get more inhibited with our questions, if we even ask them at all, we are generally too cautious. People are always much more revealing and personal when they are telling stories and people are dying to tell their stories but very often, no one has ever asked about them. Naturally, the conversation gets warmer and more fun.

People don’t go into enough detail when they tell a story and so, turn them into a narrator without trying to be a stopper. If somebody tells you he is having trouble with his teenager, don’t turn around and say: “I know exactly what you mean. I’m having incredible problems with my own child.” You may think you’re trying to build a shared connection, but what you are really doing is shifting attention back to yourself.

Asking people where they grew up when meeting for the first time inevitable gets people to be are at their best when talking about their childhoods. That gets them talking about their families and ethnic backgrounds. I once asked a group of doctors, “What’s one favourite unimportant thing about you?” I learned that a very impressive academic I know has a fixation on trashy reality TV. And there, after a hearty laughter, we established trust with each other. It is great to ask such crazy questions, ones that lift people out of their daily defence strategies and help them see themselves as one of us. One great ice breaker has been - If you died today, what would you regret not doing?

Intentionally or not, lots of people walk into conversations carrying a lot of elite baggage embedded in systems that disrespect them or keep them down. At times, it is political and there is often criticism, blame and disagreement in such conversations. The temptation to get defensive will be there but it’s best to resist this temptation. The first tip to any such conversation across difference or inequality is to stand in other people’s standpoint and fully understand how the world looks to them. 

In any conversation, respect is like air. When it’s present nobody notices it, and when it’s absent it’s all anybody can think about. My view of wisdom has changed over the years and I think tha the wise person’s essential gift is tender receptivity. Note that every conversation takes place on 2 levels. The official conversation is represented by the words we are saying on whatever topic we are talking about. The actual conversations occur amid the ebb and flow of emotions that get transmitted as we talk. With every comment, respect or disrespect will be exhibited, making one feel a little safer or a little more threatened. The essential moral skill in such situations is being considerate to others in the complex circumstances of everyday life rather than just be right. This art of fluid conversation, I wanted to learn initially for:

1. Utilitarian reasons - If I’m going to work as a clinician, I don’t just want to be a superficial diagnostician and therapy guy. I must understand my patients more deeply — to know whether he or his family is in any crisis, can he handle uncertainty with comfort or is he of a self-centered nature or generous to people around?

2. Moral reasons, too - If I can shine empowerment and positive attention on others, I can help them to blossom with least medication and fewer visits. If I see potential in their children, the family may come to see the hidden potential in them. True understanding is one of the most generous gifts any of us can give to another.

3. Reasons of congenial community survival - We have evolved over time to live with groups of people like ourselves. Now we live in wonderfully diverse societies, but our social skills are inadequate for the divisions that exist. 

If we let fear and a sense of threat grip our conversation, then very quickly our motivations will deteriorate. We won’t talk to understand but to pummel. Everything we say afterward will be injurious and hurtful and will make repairing the relationship in the future harder. If, on the other hand, I show persistent curiosity about your viewpoint, I show respect. And as the authors of “Crucial Conversations” observe, in the best conversations, whether they are between you and your mom on a marathon phone call or at a professional discussion, everyone is listening closely. They are curious about each other, asking is he reacting authentically or speaking just be heard. They are allowing the conversation to happen without muscling it toward any predetermined outcome but yes, they are all observing. What is important to learn and adopt is - If we are going to accompany someone well in the journey of a conversation, we need to abandon the perfection or efficiency mind-set. We need to take our time and simply delight in another person’s way of being. I hope conversations teach people not only how to understand others but also, how to make them feel respected, valued and understood. 

Am I the only hypocrite or the world is, too?

Until I started depending on Uber and Ola, I travelled everywhere by my car but that never failed to drive me crazy. This was because despite my sane waiting or crawling, impatient drivers would inevitably cut in right and left or at the very last moment, making those who exercised common decency or who followed the rules, appear as immature idiots. That included me and whenever this happened, I’d descend into a rage about the inconsiderate, selfish drivers but also tinged with something else: a kind of self-congratulatory smugness that I would never do such a thing. But when I reflected, I recalled that I do too at times - the genuine hypocrite!

In today’s divided, ostrich like situations, there is scarcely a more common epithet hurled in public life than “hypocrite.” The world is in a penumbra of impotence, even as we face wall-to-wall crises: the heating planet; wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan; the migrant crisis, the famine crisis, etc. In place of action and solutions, which seem totally out of reach, we substitute judgment. And what is more satisfying to adjudicate than the charge of hypocrisy? 

After all, we are a collection of aspirations and failings, from which we try to be who we think we should be but constantly fall short. But I understand the appeal of calling out what looks like hypocrisy when we see it, since at no time in human history has it been possible so easily to detect, denounce and pitch the words of so many people against their deeds - the root portrayal of hypocrisy. Although hypocrisy presents in many forms, some are indisputable and relatively low, oozing with bad odour like when I ask my kids to state that I am out when I am snuggled lazily at home. 

Others have unbearably high stakes, like in the case of all politicians where the hypocrisy is starkly visible as they bathe and stay immersed in their sin of enduring deception. For the politicians, it is a kind of alluring power: pretending to be someone they are innately not - humble when they are not and intelligent when they are imbecile. This comes easy to them since they are always playing a pretending role when they profess heartless sympathy or when they are at their best, turning to political cynicism and when they are at their worst, veering towards hypocrisy. 

Catching this deception of politicians turn out to be deeply satisfying for the media, the layman and even even fellow politicians to bring low the person who previously had a claim to the moral high ground. And, the entire media will willingly sell their souls to obtain this perfume of luxury bashing without measuring the truth. The internet and social media have created a permanent record of publicly recorded stances, offering an all-you-can-eat buffet of human inconstancy, ready-made for our eager appetites. 

Steering away from politicians, hypocrisy is visible in other doamins too like the esteemed portals of learning and in the power of the pen, too. There was a time when being a college student meant that you willingly submitted to the rules, expectations and judgments of a professor or a department. You did not get to grade your teachers at the end of the term, as what mattered to the university was their opinion of you, not yours of them. The relationship was unabashedly hierarchical. As a student, you were presumed ignorant, but teachable. You paid the university for the opportunity to decrease your ignorance. Sadly, much of this has been overturned in recent years. Students today, whose parents often pay fortunes for their education, are treated like valuable customers, not sponge like apprentices. University curriculums have moved away from core requirements — the idea that there are things all educated people ought to have read, understood and discussed together — to a kind of mix-and-match set of offerings. Engineering teaching have endured frequent budgetary cuts for not being seen to provide practical benefits — viz. skills that are beyond practical value in the job market. The result has been the hollowing out of higher education. 

Professors cater to students and institutions with higher grades and diminished expectations.  Where do the kids in today’s academic institutions get conviction to shift focus away from their studies to Palestine and Ukraine? Part of it is youthful idealism, and part of it stems from ideological currents in elite academia and the media. But an equal part is the substitution of critical thinking with the ceaseless affirmation of emotional choice. Can we reverse the trend? There is a wisdom rooted in knowledge, expertise and experience that collectively goes by the name of authority. Isn’t it time to restore it.

As for news media, here too there was a time when Arnab Goswami used to be synonymous with “the nation wants to know…”, and be largely believed. His authority derived from the accuracy and quality of his reports. But slowly his audience understood that the news he was dishing was not simply facts, as they wanted but shaped and tainted with opinions. 

This is happening as the current approach is not to seek or create news media that provides straighter news or a better balance of opinion. It has been to turn the tables. Conservatives, including me, note that “mainstream media” often present a slant on the news. Why do media indulge in such hypocrisy? Is the bygone era of honest journalism dead? Because it has proved immensely profitable, especially on cable TV, radio airwaves and now podcasts. It has given previously disaffected consumers a much wider range of options for where they obtain their news, or at least the version of it that does the least to contradict their beliefs. 

But what it has produced is not better-informed citizens. It is a land of cacophony, confusion and conspiracy theories. To give hypocrisy a pass, one might argue, is to slide down a slope toward having no principles at all. In these merciless political times, it would be better for our minds to focus on the true betrayals that really matter. Perhaps if we embrace the inevitable inconsistencies within ourselves, we can have a more generous, less purity-focused people of practical good aimed at real change.

Think contra! What if higher education did some introspection away from hypocrisy and responded to plummeting public confidence by demanding a whole lot more of their students, especially through extensive core requirements? What if professors gave grades that reflected actual performance? What if administrators responded to rules-breaking through summary expulsions? What if the news media, also facing declining levels of trust, stopped catering to their least literate readers, stopped caring about their angriest ones, stopped publishing dumbed-down versions of news, and stopped acting as if journalism is just another form of entertainment? 

Maybe moves like these may spell the death of academia & the news media but may also help save them recover from the pits of their hypocrisy and as for me, it will help my turnaround from the small tit bits of hypocrisy that I have indulged in and realize now. The words today’s youth almost never want to hear — “You are wrong” — are sometimes the ones that, unknowingly, they must get used to.