Skip to main content

Social Cues

M was a former client from over ten years ago. Recently, I was at the company where she now works for a customer meeting that did not involve. I decided to stop by at her office to say hello and was very warmly received. She asked why I had not let her know sooner so we could have done lunch or dinner. It has been my experience unfortunately, a lot of times these statements are made without much sincerity - just as a social gesture, a filler of space in a short, impromptu conversation. And such thinking has led me to frequently treat them as such.

As a social experiment, I decided to inform M a few weeks prior to my next visit there. Almost predictably, she politely declined claiming a prior engagement that would preclude the possibility of dinner - maybe next time. Logically speaking, ofcourse I could let her know the next time too and see how that goes - and in my greener years I would take people at their word and do what's logical. 

As I grow older, my desire to try again diminishes greatly. This incident got me thinking about social cues and how unless a person is prone to finessing their own feelings and emotions, they are unlikely to understand when others do so. It ends up feeling awkward for the one who is more plain-spoken.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques

Fresh Thought

A lot has and will be said by both pro-life and pro-choice activists in defense of their respective positions. You figure you have heard both sides and the argument and neither has anything new to add. Richard Dawkins says something that I had not read before : If you follow the 'pro-life' logic to its conclusion, a fertile woman is guilty of something equivalent to murder every time she refuses an offer of copulation. Such may be intended consequences of taking things to their logical conclusion. His argument might be "logical", but it  ends up diluting the case of pro-choice advocates. It should not be necessary to go quite this far to make a point. In that it does, exposes a weakness or lack of convinction the other side could exploit. You have to wonder if Dawkins had taken his line of reasoning to it's logical conclusion as well.

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t