The night was drawing in slowly when the four of us came out of the vice chancellor’s office. We had an official event in the university that day and now we were arranging for rides to take us back home. Our other classmates were waiting in the cafeteria at a five minutes walking distance. The chairman of our department had called two drivers for two separate routes. We began waiting just outside the office. One of the driver arrived after two or three minutes. One of my classmates talked to him about the stops he had to make for each one of us along the way. But it turned out that the driver was more than reluctant to take us, mere students, in his ‘official’ car, a clean and shiny Toyota Corolla, and that too, when it wasn’t listed anywhere in his ‘official duty’.
Here’s what the case was, as laid down by that driver: He and the car was not our department’s but of our neighbor department’s. If he took us in that car without letting his own department’s chairman know, he might’ve gotten into trouble later. This was the gist of his argument, though he added some detailed comments about how this was an absurd idea literally every two minutes.
I couldn’t get his reluctance at first because he had been called officially by our chairman and this was pretty much not as big a deal as he was making it to be. And I expressed this confusion to my other two classmates in a casual tone. Ah, yes. My casual tone. Let me tell you about this first.
I use this particular tone under two circumstances. One, when I am 100% sure that what I am going to say is actually the case, but it is something that is either a very complex or a very bold thing to say or know. So I say it with diluted tone and words such that I am able to first measure the response and interest of the listener. If I get a positive signal, I continue with facts and anecdotes related to the subject. It’s basically my recipe for making good conversations.
Two, when I am in situations where the world will not perish away if I do not comment on the subject in hand, but nevertheless I say something naive about it, out loud. It is still not a completely spontaneous action, though. I do this with the intention that maybe my company at that time has an interesting insight about the matter. Maybe, just maybe this uneventful situation has a quirky side to it and I can’t see it. And at times, they do have great insights. I have had a decent number of good conversations this way, too. However, in such cases, I’m not too disappointed if things are actually that boring and no one has anything substantial to say about them.
That night, it was the second case. I knew the driver had to drive us home eventually as he was directed to do so by a high enough authority. I just didn’t want to stand there and listen to him arguing unnecessarily. And so, I remarked.
“What’s the matter with him?” I said as if I could’ve never guessed.
“Don’t you see? It’s all about this!” My classmate said, gesturing with his hands. I saw it attentively. He had loosely curled his right-hand fingers and rubbed his thumb back and forth on his index finger. Money. The driver apparently wanted us to pay him for his off-duty trip.
“Hmm. Could be.” I thought to myself. It was a plausible reason and so I believed it for a moment (I wasn’t so sure after the happenings that followed). The situation was still mundane and I decided to act a little longer.
“Really?” I asked with a surprised look as if I could never expect that to be the reason. Maybe I even mentioned how absurd this proposition was. I can’t remember exactly what I said but it certainly carried disapproval.
“What else? This is the world. Real world. It’s not like the world of your books, you know. You are always reading these books, and what you read in there, it doesn’t happen in the real world!”
Honestly, I can’t say if these were his exact words. I’m not good at remembering exact details and dialogues. But wherever I go and whoever I meet, I carry away from there, the idea and the essence of my experiences and conversations. And he said something very close to this. But what did he mean by that?
Imagine you’ve enrolled in an undergraduate program and you’re making up your mind about your classmates, you know, mentally grouping them and sizing them up, because of course you can’t approach every one of them and hear their life-story and then give your verdict about their personalities. It’s far easier the first way. And we are lazy people. So you see this girl, always carrying a non-academic book with her, making notes in a pocket-sized notebook about God-knows-what, sitting alone quietly on the stairs, lost in thought, not mixing casually with her fellow-students except a few , and more things like these. During Communication Skills class, she gets up and talks about how happiness shouldn’t be a goal in your life or on the topic of dehumanization on the basis of Dunbar’s number. You see where this all comes from. The books. All these ideas and things people don’t generally talk about and yet they are the only thing she seems interested in talking about. Idealistic. Hmm. You tick a box on her evaluation sheet. You would’ve labelled her as ‘completely naive’ but she does quite well in academics so you just settle on ‘escapist book-smart’.
Since he first uttered those words, I’ve thought about the most appropriate response. What would have been the most fitting response to his most interesting comment about me?
Should I have told him, as I even thought of doing so at that very moment, how I mostly read non-fiction (If that’s where he got his idea from)? I read only with the intention to gain insights and to actually try them in my real life. I mean non-fiction is stuff from the real world, isn’t it? History books, biographies and autobiographies, writings on cognitive science, on development of ideologies, on life philosophies… isn’t that the real world? What’s the difference between going to a talk by an accomplished professional, hearing out his life experiences and reading them on paper? Yes, the former may include the privilege of two-way conversation but it still isn’t a priceless advantage. Besides, good books have the ability to converse with an avid reader. Which I am not, as yet. Sigh.
That was the immediate response that came to me. But that was not and is not, the answer. I knew what else I could say to him. I could’ve just told him about my little acts, my personas. How I decide what kind of a person I am going to be in front of a particular person or a group of people and that was it! In front of my classmates, I’d decided to be that restrained, lost-in-thought bookworm, so that I could avoid unwanted attention and invitations to gatherings where the predominant activity is useless gossip and indecent conversation. I value forming new relationships with people but I certainly value my time more.
And now when the moment to respond has drowned deeply down in the past, I think I know what I can say to an ‘assertion’ like that. When he said that I know nothing of the ‘real world’, I should’ve said that he probably knew nothing of the ‘real’. Yes, I am childishly delving into the age-long debate about reality. Whether it is ‘really’ there or is it the creation of our minds? Confusing stuff like that. I mean do we really have a world where the most ‘worldly’ thing the driver could do was ask for money? If I have learned anything in life up till now, it is that what is applicable to people may not be applicable to the individual. So, if it is common sense that on average, people are greedy and like to exploit others’ in times of need, it should be common sense too that you cannot apply common sense to uncommon situations. And when it comes to strangers, people you know actually nothing about, interactions are always special. There is a world out there where people are always following certain unsaid principles and where individuals are always breaking them.
Reality is what is happening, not what happens. Just because something has happened or does happen in a certain way, it does not mean it should happen that way. If it were like that, no progress could’ve been made, be it scientific or social or whatever. There is no one way to live. And thank God for that!
The first two responses crossed my mind as an amalgam that night when I was standing there, having listened how unworldly I was, with all my bookish wisdom. Yes, those two lengthy paragraphs swept in me within a span of seconds. I immediately realized where he was coming from, what he meant by that and why he said that. But can you believe it that I said nothing to him? (At least nothing substantial since I don’t remember it!). I only smiled. Yes, I smiled most warmly.
