To all the professionals who've ghosted me before

When a business contact suddenly becomes unresponsive, it shows their apathy

- NIKHIL TANEJA

Before the dawn of the text message, and much before the great coming of WhatsApp, communication was no rocket science. If you had to talk to someone, you either were never able to reach them (because they were unresponsive/unavailable/ uninterested), or you were able to (over a phone call/over a meeting / over bumping into each other at the supermarket by 'accident'). But there was no way for you to start a conversation with someone IRL and then just stop.

I mean, think about it. Have you ever had a phone call where, after a point, the person just stopped responding? Sure, every one of us has pretended that there's no network coverage when you're bored out of your skull during a conversation, but even that takes minimal effort of loud, OTT 'Hello!?'s before you are done speaking. And when you have a physical meeting, you need to make a painful excuse about emergencies (home/professional/toilet), if you ever want to get out of it without offending the other person. This was both our courtesy and our curse, that we'd have to put a full stop to every conversation before we could avoid ever getting into one again.

The 'easy' paradox