Yet another Way…!

How to deal with differences?

- Gayathri Ramachandran

Chennai got to experience the fury of nature when Vardha ravaged the city a few months back. Everything in Chennai came to a standstill. Power supply, the lifeline of existence, was disrupted for a very long time which brought life to a crawl in the city. After the storm, Chennai looked like a war zone with trees uprooted everywhere. No one dared to venture out with gusty winds blowing at 140 Kmph. I assume that most households stayed indoors as much as we did. Schools were closed; there was no power supply, no TV and very little stock of food. We therefore had no option but to gather ourselves in the living room for hours together. I reckon with only such situations every person in the family get-together in one room.

We at home felt it was a boon in disguise. Minutes became hours, as we felt time was literally crawling at its own pace. The natural choice for 'time pass' was to indulge in small talk on a wide range of subjects. Time led us into a hot topic that was doing the rounds at the national level during that time. A heated national topic can't escape even a saint seated in a cave far off in the Himalayas. That being the case, how could we have been insulated ​from it? The hour long small talk slowly evolved into a heated debate. Each one of us had very strong opinions about the subject. But somewhere we started to lose the context and the debate turned emotional with each of us taking sides rather than debating the subject. A very familiar situation that most of us would have encountered in our families when small talk actually leads to debate and then gradually raises itself into a confrontation! All that we ended with at the end of precious hours was nothing but sore feelings.