Forgetting To Converse While Talking

By Shafia Parveen

Tired and squished into an auto, I get a call from my father. It was late evening. I hadn’t spoken to him in a week. He said in a panicky voice, “I have been logged out of both my Facebook accounts and I can't log back in. What should I do?” I can't say anything without seeing your phone but by the time I had ended my sentence, the line had gone silent. He had hung up. 

It is not a classic case of a troubled parent-child relationship, just that he was out of the city for work and we hadn’t talked. I got all my father’s updates from mom. 

Reaching home, I rang the doorbell and saw my mother’s face appear in the door chain. She noisily opened the door and said, I can't log into Facebook. “What are the odds, Dad called and said the same. Maybe it’s an outage. Just wait it out,” I said casually. Not satisfied, she brought me her phone and asked if I could do something. I repeated myself and she didn’t look happy and puttered back to her room looking into her phone. 

Cut to three months later and a sea of patiently waiting faces surrounds me. It was a no-phone event. The celebrity hadn’t come to the stage and the audience, phoneless, was waiting for his appearance. When I say phoneless, I mean the organisers made us put our phones on silent and put them into disposable plastic bags. I couldn’t understand the strange policing and promptly tore the plastic bag and texted people. I was bored. 

When I looked around, I saw that a large number of the audience had chosen to not take their phones out of their disposable plastic bags. I felt a twang of guilt but then I watched people, phoneless. Among the singles, some had already adopted a regimented routine of looking at their shoes, some were looking down from the balcony, some had slid down their chairs and stared at the ceiling. I did catch one guy dozing. Those who had come in large groups didn’t seem to have a problem as they laughed and joked in a hushed tone. There were, of course, couples for whom neither the delay nor phonelessness seemed to be a problem as they stared into one another’s eyes. 

As the clock ticked, I saw more people fiddling with the closure of the disposable bag and some like me had succumbed and taken their phones out and were tapping away at them. I tried chatting with my neighbours but eventually returned to my phone. It was less awkward. 

I wonder if Alexander Graham Bell turns in his grave realising what he invented to connect people has become one of the prime sources of isolation and alienation. The invention of the earbuds, which often make people look like they are talking to themselves, only underscores this fallacy. I think communication isn’t dead, conversations are. 

My parents are in their sixties and seventies, respectively, and hooked onto their phones, read Facebook, like teenagers to drugs. And it is not just my parents, it seems like an oddly common phenomenon. I have noticed aged people on public transport watch reels on Facebook on loud, completely unaware of their surroundings or the discomfort they are causing. And believe me, I have tried rolling my eyes, it doesn’t help.

Hence, it is of little surprise that a lot of our conversations at home also revolve around what my parents have seen on Facebook — someone got married, someone got a promotion, someone moved cities, somebody went on a vacation, someone had a baby, someone had another baby and sometimes, particularly in my father’s case, comments on people’s subjective status update (if you don’t know Facebook it is where people write whatever catches their fancy or whatever passes through their mind.) In most cases, I listen for a few minutes before it becomes a background score to whatever I am doing — which is, again in most cases, peering into my phone, slipping in and out of a rarely synced nebula of words. My chats on different platforms look like stream-of-consciousness narratives divided by the sent dates and interspersed with emojis. I listen to podcasts and music, I attend all office meetings, and I follow instructions. I watch videos and reels, movies and series. I read books, newspapers, magazines, and most of what social media throws at me; I participate in banal online polls, and even leave comments on random posts on social media platforms. I tell the doctor about my aches and physiological discomforts; I tell my shrink about the demons in my mind and niggling insecurities. I talk a lot but I don’t converse. Do you converse? Does anybody converse anymore?

If I were to piece together my input at a meeting, my comments on a social media post, my monosyllabic replies to my parents, my rants to my friends, the lecture of my favourite political leaders, and the messages across my social media platforms will it amount to a conversation?

Conversations are hard. It is a two-way, or even multi-way, traffic. I speak you listen and you speak and I listen. But for that, we will have to be present in the moment, calm our minds and hearts, engage our attention and facial muscles and most difficult of all, concentrate. That seems so much more difficult than being a pair of lurking eyes or an anonymous commentator on social media, or an obedient employee or child who does what she is told, forever replying and even asking expected questions. 

Why converse when I can hide in the din of so much talk?

By Shafia Parveen