Have you ever noticed that small talk in India is mostly a seasonal affair, determined by the climatic or social features of a periodical event? Thus, a social conversation can be quite predictable, across the country, between friends, colleagues or even strangers meeting for the first time in a social milieu.

For instance, the favoured topic at this time of the year revolves around the monsoon and the vagaries of this annual phenomenon. Hasn’t it been late in arriving goes the chatter; it will be a deficit monsoon this year for sure, one expected this as we hardly had more than 3 days in summer when the temperature crossed 42 degrees; thank God we’re having rains now, though late, the papers say likely as not there won’t be a water problem for months to come; do you believe that power cuts will be history now?

Disgust is expressed over potholes turned into craters, over roads that are a mess of ditches with a bit of road in between, and general disillusionment converts to verbal condemnation of the laxity of the government and the corruption that allows such a sorry state of affairs to prevail.

A subject enjoying preferred status this year is the splitting of the erstwhile state of Andhra Pradesh — will the new state of Telangana do or not do better than the residual state of Andhra; who will be the better chief minister, K.C.Rao or Naidu; what has Telangana’s CM achieved in the first 100 days of his government when he himself has admitted that nothing has been done beyond the planning stage; and did you listen to his rabble-rousing raving and ranting against the media, in language that does not behove the leader of a state, especially when one knows that some of the broad insinuations against some of his party men are largely true?

Then there is the wedding season. The most auspicious days for marriages fall at reassuringly regular intervals several times during the year, when the position of the moon and stars are in sync with each other and the planets shine benignly on affianced couples. So dates are fixed, wedding venues confirmed, and the prices of suitable “function halls” for the marriage ceremony are compared and exclaimed over. The chatter grows around money spent by the bride’s parents on her trousseau, the expenditure incurred by the two families on all associated events from selecting wedding invitations to the wedding feasts and the mehndi (henna) ceremony preceding it, the size and nature of the dowry and the subsequent page 3 coverage of assorted events. The next hot topic of conversation is the approaching school and college holidays and the plans for overseas or domestic vacations, or a post mortem of the holiday experience at the next get-together. From August onwards, festivals like Ganesh Chaturthi, Navaratri and Dasera, Diwali and Christmas are brought into the ambit of small talk about big dos and enjoy cult-like status today. Now a new festival has been added with Bonalu being declared the new state festival for Telangana and this moves the festival season forward from August to July!

Passion for cricket

Party season begins from November and continues into January. The weather is just right for heavy dressing and there is delight in meeting up to flaunt one’s gourmet tastes over discussions about lavish spreads, and in re-uniting with seldom seen friends and gushing (or not) about homes and interior decors recently visited.

Of course, we Indians cannot discount the small talk that covers the nation’s passion for cricket, or the World Cup Football season, when the discussions and dissections could be either of the game itself or the players, their injuries, their records, or the games’ sleazy underbelly in the garb of match-fixing.

And what is it about our obsessive-compulsive preoccupation with our servants and maids that urge us to wax eloquent over their perfidies no matter how well we look after them, pay their children’s school fees, give them short term loans and buy the whole family new clothes on their festival. We Indian women are not as dependent on machines for domestic chores as are our western counterparts, therefore the frequent AWOLs (always because a relative has died) take their toll on our patience and our health for we are no longer used to washing and cleaning our homes by ourselves.

The long and the short of it, in conclusion, is that we Indians need never confine our small talk to just the weather and our health. There is so much more that is happening in our lives that we simply need to share with whoever will listen, the more captive our audience the better.

Vimala Madon is a freelance journalist based in Secunderabad, India.