I dunno!

Nearly a decade ago, a relative of mine asked me to write down my goals – short, medium and long term. I don’t exactly recall what I wrote – But I clearly remember the most crucial part of his brief – Be as detailed as possible but keep it to one page. I was a dashing youngster back then – I simply thought he suffers from some disorder. A wiser man today, I realise how prescient he actually was, how ahead of his time.

Meet my relative-uncle. I have always looked upto him for crucial decisions of my life. He is my unofficial crisis manager. But I have found one more potential manager – Displacement and progress are so interlinked, isn’t it? – When you are continuously displaced, you make friends easily. You have low expectations from the unfamiliar; hence you are more pleasantly surprised than frustrated when faced with life’s many ups and downs. You explore everything around you-develop curiosity-new lands, customs, food, and ways of doing things begin to draw you in. You learn to survive on the strength of who you are, for this day, today. You build ingenuity in order to survive. You trust strangers and hence, strangers trust you. You build intuitive capability to sniff trouble-which can tell you when to leave a bar! You become an interesting person, cause you have lots of stories to tell.

Finally, you learn to move on?.

Alright, I took the plane to a different land.

Speaking business,

My uncle told – keep it detailed yet restrict it to a page!!

His advice has stayed with me? My preferred means of communication is the SMS but since I do not give out my phone number that easily, most people email me, directly if it’s personal. Long emails invariably pile up unread. Short ones are swiftly acted upon. And when I choose to talk to the world, I go on twitter where all messaging is restricted to 140 characters. No, not alphabets; characters. That would include punctuation and spaces between words. Think it’s funny? Try it. People effortlessly convey the most complex, convoluted ideas in 140 characters. That’s all it needs if you are a smart communicator. And, as with SMS, people on twitter hate tweets that spill over. No, no one out there has the time or the patience to read a message that’s not complete in itself. So much for the silly snobs who think twitter’s a waste of time and meant for unemployed pre-teens or prematurely retired seniles. I am no longer on Twitter though. I chose my blog as a replacement.

Verbosity is widely despised today. I guess it comes from our deep and enduring disgust for pompous, windbag politicians, garrulous chat show hosts, bombastic journalists, rambling academics, prolix bloggers, loquacious gurus, chatterbox celebrities with nothing to talk about but the tedium of their boring, over exposed lives. The sheer dread of having to listen to them forces most of us to put on our earphones and listen to Black Eyed Peas instead. There was a time when the Silent Mariner could transfix you with just a stare. But the tyranny of words took over. Luckily, what man messes up, technology often heals. So, quietly, almost unobtrusively, we are slowly returning to sanity, rediscovering the art of saying things short, simple, succinct.

In the turgid, turbulent Age of Verbosity, brevity had almost died. Poetry was in purgatory. Silence was misread as being dumb or dumbfounded. People were admired for not what they said but for how long and how often they said it. Our Yeddy gives out the same speech wherever he goes. Our Kohli doesn’t know how to face the press. He repeats, trying to be stylish. Our Gowda doesn’t know what to speak in the Parliament. He speaks for hours which can be regarded as worthless shit.

But it’s not just politics that has become so wordy. Look at business contracts. When Mani Ratnam began making movies decades ago he signed one page contracts and rarely had any disputes. Today Johar signs 120 page contracts-Numerous clauses and shit. Lazy, loquacious legalese has taken the place of precise English. What we tend to lose sight of is that loquacity is usually a cover for the vilest of intent. Hidden amidst a million words is a boobytrap you could easily miss. My own belief is that the more verbose, the more convoluted a contract is, the more the chances of it leading to a bruising court battle. When Nani started to debate in the Bombay High Court, people from all walks of life sat and appreciated the man. Palkhivala is the real man. No one comes close too.

What legalese hides, love flaunts. My biggest dread has always been those painful long love letters that bleedings hearts send to each other. Look at the lyrics of a few love songs – How many times I have slept unknowingly thinking of pathetic wordings. I have always believed that a simple, well delivered kiss and meddling her hair is worth a thousand tired phrases.

Do I miss words at all? Yes I do occasionally. But as long as they are few, I’m fine. It’s the avalanche that scares me. Excess is not my scene. I respect the simple, the short, the hint of things to come. I like the play of imagination. Imagination’s what I think this century is going to be all about. So my choice is clear. Twitter over War and Peace. Haiku over James Joyce. Cinema Paradiso over Star Wars. The Bhagwad Gita, The Bible and The Quran over the intimidating religious theories.

Did you know?

Jd