Anything, Everything, All The Time

Hola people! Whatsup? I know I know, all of you are busy like crazy in your fast running lives. Hmmpphhh, well same here. Can’t believe it’s almost December now and this year is ending too! Hope everything is going great at your end.

You know I just attended a great conference, something that I was excited about but it turned to be truly enriching to me in more ways than I had envisaged. While there were many highs about the sessions in that conference (more on those later :)) but there was this one comment by an international speaker that I thought I must share with you all and ask your views on it. As is the case with any conference these days, the speakers were hardly getting any chance to speak as almost everyone in the audience had to speak something after every few minutes, wait let me say after every few ‘seconds’. No I’m serious, people these days have to speak anything on everything and that too all the time. Gone are the days when speakers used to wait for questions, today thanks to internet and the connected smart phones in our hands, everybody in the audience is super smart. Intelligence is available just at the click of our fingers and everybody has profound observations to make on almost everything.  People want to be noticed and broadcast their respective moments of fame on Twitter or Facebook or whatsoever social site that is work-in-progress right now. Same was going on in that conference too, mid way interruptions with “I think this” or “my opinion on this is that” kind of unnecessary comments along with “let me get a picture clicked with this celeb speaker” to “let me post this on twitter before anyone else”. Finally one of the international speakers commented – “You Indians are the chattier lot. No, I don’t mean any offence to you, it’s a good thing but among all present in this room from different countries, Indians have maximum opinions on most of the things.” Well, one look at her expression and you knew how ‘good’ she thought it was 😀 :P. Few of us laughed, few were embarrassed but after sometime, we were back to being the same.

While the session ended but I kept on thinking at her comment for long. Why do we have opinions on almost everything and that too such strong ones? Why do we have such poor listening skills but strong verbal skills? Why do we have this urge to prove “I’m the best” or “I know the best” all the time? Why are we always in a hurry to speak first and prove our point? Why are we always so insecure but trying to project to be oh-so-intelligent and confident all the time? While I personally like the warmth of our relationships and inter-personal equations in Indian culture but aren’t we also too judgmental of each other now? Partly you can say it’s in our culture but I think partly it’s also the age in which we are living in currently. We know too many things about each other now and of course we only know good things about others lives as that’s what we are busy broadcasting socially in our real as well as virtual world. Nobody updates the fight they had with their spouse last night but this one dinner on some rooftop restaurant must be broadcasted to all. And the ones who are having a fight today with their spouse heave a sigh of frustration at this update without realizing that the other one had already gone through similar fights yesterday :D.

Why are we always in this deep need of exhibiting our life to others and why is it increasing day by day? Some amount of competition is good in life but why this competition and pressure for anything & everything and that too all the time? This why and that why and many more whys…