Smile at a stranger. See what happens.
Parent — there’s a strong protective feel to the word right? Parents handle all our tantrums, make us smile when we are crying, buy us our favourite toys & sweets and most importantly, teach and guide us to be good individuals.
There are a lot of things which they tell us while we are growing up. “Respect your elders”. “Be kind to people”. “You should have good table manners and never waste food”. There are many more things which are in our parent’s list to see us as good human beings. But, the most interesting one I feel is — “Don’t talk to strangers”.
I would like to slightly digress from the topic over here and talk about the picture used above. The ‘Keep Calm and blah blah’ rage on the internet is something which I’m not the biggest fan of. The poster has been used so much that it has lost its punch. It’s like the price of good goes down when there is a glut in the market. It just got sucked into the internet, where posts like the one above are commonplace.
Enough of digressing (force of habit), I’ll come back to my initial point — “Don’t talk to strangers”. It’s quite funny how things change from when we were kids to when we grow up. From when as children, we were not supposed to talk to strangers, we are now, often expected to get hitched to someone we have never met. In a more professional context, we are constantly striving to create ‘business relations’, mostly with strangers.
Personally, most of the strangers who I meet and strike a conversation with, have very little significance in my life. It’s mostly small talks in bus rides, flights back home or job interviews. But, once in a blue moon, you meet a person who you can truly connect with and have a meaningful conversation. There’s a very high probability that you may never see that person again, but it feels nice to have spoken to them, even if it is just for an hour or so.
I met one such person in one of the most popular pubs in Bangalore recently. Two of my friends had got jobs the previous day. Couple it up with us winning the college cricket tournament, it definitely called for a celebration. The evening started out on very boring note. Eleven of us on a table of twelve. We had small groups of 2s and 3s as we hogged the delicious food that was served. A few drinks down and we all hit the sweet spot. Ah! It is an excellent feeling! Isn’t it?
The DJ who was playing James Blunt songs initially, started dropping the beat. One of my dancer friends taught me some nice moves as I tried to match up to my friends. And believe me, I was dancing like I was possessed. All my friends, along with me of course (Ha Ha), set the tone for the entire house to groove. Most of the people around us joined in, along with the two lovely ladies who were sitting on the same table as us (Saturday night, shortage of space). One of them turned out to be in the same college as a friend of mine in the US, so we had something to talk about.
What started as a casual dance, moved to having drinks together to having a deep conversation. There were many things which were building up inside me. And I felt a need to let all of that out. Telling someone how I was feeling at that point of time felt relieving. And, it was the stranger who helped.
It was very different for me. It was the first time I had spoken to a complete stranger about my life. Where my friends pushed me to casually talk to this lady, I’m glad it turned out to be nice friendly conversation. It helped me find some peace within.
There may be many reasons why I might have shared my feelings with a stranger. I might have been slightly intoxicated, there was too much inside me, I just knew that this will happen just once or probably a combination of all. Whatever said and done, it felt really nice. My friends and I celebrated not only jobs and the cricket match, but also new friends.
So, thank you stranger. I hope we meet again. Cheers!
