The Rail Tale: Part 2

Continued from The Rail Tale: Part 1...

You have finally settled down in whatever little place you could find. You felt happy for a moment. Now that moment's long gone. Terror is what follows.
You look around. The characters around you are distinct. They are trying to get involved into something, so that they can pass the 24 hours of journey that follows. In a quick glance, you can see an uncle, an auntie, and their two kids, age 10 or something. Gender does not matter. They are devils.

You quickly try to look in the other direction but fail miserably when the uncle catches you looking. You have to pay the price. Sigh.
"Where will you get off?"
"Surat," you say, trying to remove eye contact.
The uncle looks satisfied with the answer, you think. But, believe me, deep down, he is angered because you are going to be there for a long time, depriving them of space.
You exchange an angered look with the children for stealing your window seat.
"So, what do you do in Surat?" asks the madamoiselle, aka the auntie ji.
"I study in Surat."
"What do you study?"
"Engineering."
Just as you finish saying this, they'll have an eye talk. Engineering. As if that's a real field.
"Which college do you study in?"
"NIT, Surat."
"Kyu? Kisi local college mein nahi mila? (Why? Didn't you get admission in a local college?)"

That's it. That's a trick question. It is a trap meant to make you feel uncomfortable. May whatever your answer be to the question, you'll end up being an idiot.

Scenario 1: You keep quiet. The auntie ends up feasting on your embarrassment. She has got her substitution of the day's saas-bahu serial she's gonna miss.

Scenario 2: You answer with a "No." You end up looking like a doofus.

Scenario 3: You answer with a "Yes". You again end up looking like a doofus.

Scenario 4: You answer neither. And then start explaining. Three yawns and four "Whatever" facial expressions later, you realise she doesn't care. You end up shutting up in utter embarrassment, and she gets the equivalent drama of 2 saas-bahu serials.

Silence follows this exercise. You deliberately take out your mobile phone and start reading promotional messages from your mobile operator, just to avoid her. After ten minutes of passing time, you are back to Square One. You, uncle, auntie, awkward silence, and staring at each other.

Finally, even if you don't even give the least damn, you ask, "Where will you get off?"
"Mumbai," says the uncle.
You nod. Silence. Two minutes of looking at each other. Then you start looking out of the opposite window. The uncle sitting there starts thinking you have some kind of keen 'interest' in him, and gets flattered. Gallows would seem to be a nicer option now.

A minute passes by, and the children start with their usual tantrums. The big family bag spreading over three seats is opened, and it seems to be no less than a departmental store. All eatables are taken out, and distributed over.
You are offered a biscuit. You decline the offer very politely.
"Arrey, take it beta..."
You decline again.
"Le lo... Mummy ne mana kiya hai? (Take it. Has your mom instructed you not to?)"
*Facepalm*
Crunch crunch. You eat that biscuit like a doll. With a blushed face. About to get married. The auntie crunches about half a factory full of 'em when you come back to senses. You turn your face away and look out of the window. Again.

You feel something's fishy. Your suspicion becomes real when the auntie, suddenly tuning from her cacophony to a melody asks you if you could 'switch' seats with her friend in another compartment during the night. You feel like a juice carton. Again.
Now that you've talked to them, eaten their biscuit, they've owned you. Saying 'No' is like challenging them for war. And looking at what your situation is, you'd be terribly defeated. They have two young kids with just enough potential to ruin your sleep, who have been specially trained for such occasions.
You shiver at the thought.
You agree. They give a wicked smile, and give a mental hi-five to each other. You feel like you just got your foot in shit. Or in your mouth. Who knows?

The 'happy family' distributes the snacks around as if they know everyone in the compartment. The person sitting at the side lower seat, who has no connection whatsoever in this whole process is dragged in. The more the merrier, they say.
Eventually, that guy at the side starts talking too. And he is such a show-off. He is talking about things that he doesn't even know about. He talks about education, books, music and what-not, and the uncle-auntie pair listens to him as if he knows everything. Somewhere, in the middle, he says something so incredibly stupid, that you almost laugh out. Yeah, right.
The uncle and auntie look at you, and think you are dumb. You are again waved off as a doofus. He goes on nevertheless, continuing his epic mission of spreading the joy of 'knowledge'.

Amidst all this, there is one lady who is a 'saint', a true believer in God. She believes that she is a messenger of God, and it is her 'duty' to impart religious values to the fellow passengers, just in case they belong to an 'uneducated' family background. She talks about karma, she talks about saadhna, and half an hour of sermons, meditations and family prayers later, you wake up with a jerk. Turns out she's still talking. She talks about all the crap that make you start doubting you're in hell. You pinch yourself just in case you are having a nightmare. Unfortunately you are not.

This lady would've shut up, had it not been for the army guy in the upper berth who contradicted her on one point that 'he didn't understand', and pouring in his unwanted philosophy of Seventh House of desire and rebirth. The saint lady takes it personally, and turns into a tigress in a matter of second. Religion gets trashed somewhere in the middle, and in no time, they start about sanskaar (values).
If it were anything like Dan Brown's Angels and Demons, you'd give a shit. You look around for ways of exit, and end up on your way to take a piss even when you don't want to.

You think you've escaped hell. 'How worse could it get?' you think. But as the train moves further ahead, you remain completely unaware of what more is to follow...

To be continued...

Part 3 here

The Gossip Monger

"Do you know that blonde girl just broke up with a third guy in just a week? I always knew that bitch was horny!" "Hey, you know, something interesting happened today... Someone talked to me about you. And it was bad...." "He is such a show-off... I heard his parents have cut him off from their money..."
The blonde girl, the back-talker and the show-off might not want to read this piece of news, but I sympathize with you - enough to write a post about it. Apparently, you have become targets to something that has just a beginning and often no ending. You have fallen prey to something whose odds of helping you are as equal as the odds of ruining your life. You have become the subject of something that is a human quality everyone possesses and utilizes very efficiently.
You, my not-so-dear friends, have become the topic of a gossip...

Gossips are interesting. They are. While modern-day people rely on facts, gossip still continues to be a major source of people's information. And it's not bad. Gossips are supposed to enhance the dynamics of a group, by making the information-transfer process speedy. Gossip has become a social interaction that helps a group know something about an individual without actually talking to them. But as much as it tries to help in the transmission of information, it stops doing so there and then only. A majority of gossips are never completely true. The point of origin of the gossip, and the point of termination of the gossip have very different versions of a piece of news. And that is because of the inclusion of many different nodes in the network - each node tries to impart its own characteristics to the original information, and by the time it reaches to the final node, it becomes something else.

And why does that happen? Why do the initial node and the final node not have the same information? What is it that changes in the process?
While a node passes on a piece of information to another node, some energy is lost in the channel. It happens often. If suppose, I tell my friend, "Person B is not applying for foreign universities. Don't know why. Anyhow, it is very expensive. If only education was so affordable." Now, suppose there was some disturbance in the background (suppose someone howled for a moment), thus damping your voice while you spoke, "Don't know why. Anyho...", then your friend will only get the following: "Person B is not applying for foreign universities. Something spoken (Becaus)e, it is very expensive. If only education was affordable"
Person B is not applying for a foreign university, not because he doesn't have money (this might be the reason, but we're not sure), but now, because of noise in communication, it has become a fact. And so, in the transfer of information between nodes, information is always lost - it is then pure chance whether the information lost was of value of not.

But it is not just the friction between the channels that causes this loss of information. A majority of the transmission process relies on the nature of the nodes transmitting the information. If I said something to my friend, and my friend has different views about the topic, the topic would be modified accordingly. Now, suppose, in the same example, if my friend is rich, and he received distorted information from me, he will further modify this information according to his own nature. He will probably pass on something like, "Person B is not applying for foreign universities because he is poor.", which may be further passed on as two different pieces of information like "Person B is not applying for foreign universities" and "Did you know he is poor? He hardly manages to attend the school with the shortage of money..."
Just look for yourself... What was the original piece of news? What has it become in the process of transmission while passing through just three nodes?

While the first phenomenon, i.e., loss of information due to damping is not very common everytime, the second phenomenon of changing the information to suit personal needs is very much common, and is the biggest factor in changing the course of gossip. Every person tries to modify the information to suit his/her context. There is even a game about it - one person tells a second person about something, and that second person has to pass it on to third, and so on, until the last person gets the information. But in the process, everyone has to change something about the information. And sometimes, it is purely hilarious to see what the difference between the original news and the final news is... Information changes bit by bit until it transforms into something else. And that is one of the prime reasons for so much of misunderstanding among groups.

It is often said that women are very interested in gossip, that they are always ready to hear something new and they always want to transfer information to someone else. That is true, but it is only partly so. Women like gossip, because everyone likes gossip, and they are subset of 'everyone'. All human beings like gossip. Because, gossip is the source of information. It is what opens the gates to our curiosity. And saying that men don't gossip is a big, fat lie. Men gossip in ways women don't even think about. And it is very interesting to see men gossip. It is very amusing to observe a group of men talking bad about someone. There are clear indications of jealousy, hatred and an urge to make oneself feel better - something that is always attributed to women. Gossiping is not a womanly trait. It is as much a part of men's circles as it is of women's. It's just the style that differs. Maybe women have special 'gossip sessions' specially reserved to discuss about someone/someone's someone/someone's something. But men don't gossip in such a way. They are discreet. They'll drop a trigger to start the conversation, and then gradually weigh in, and when the discussion reaches an ignition point, they add the spark that causes the conversation to take place. So, it is false to say that men don't gossip. Maybe they gossip even more than women. (Sorry for revealing the secrets of the brotherhood... I really needed something to write about!)

Gossips may turn the course of the original information, but sometimes, information is manipulated on purpose, just to damage someone's reputation. That is when information turns into a 'rumour'. Rumours are some of the biggest weapons in the communication process. The sad part is that everyone has access to these weapons. They are like missiles - on whom, everybody has control. Now a person may use a missile to attack an enemy, or he can do it just for fun. The end result is same - something is damaged. And the extent of the damage depends on the connections through which the information passes. And these rumours are basically responsible for people turning against each other, because people will start having prejudiced opinions of each other. And that would basically hinder the very process of effective communication. The rule is to never trust a rumour. It only takes one person to create, two to confirm and three to factualize it...

An episode of the popular T.V. Series, The Big Bang Theory, called The Herb Garden Germination showed how gossip usually travels. Two of the characters of the show made an experiment to see how much time it took for a piece of gossip to travel. They used a statement to be propagated, and a counter statement to check the flow of the original statement. The end result was that no one discussed about the counter statement. The entire group focused only on the first statement, because it was more interesting and unexpected than the second. And so, it could be seen from just a 20-minute episode that we talk about things that interest us - we only consider passing information that makes us surprised and sounds interesting. Because, some part of us always wants entertainment in the form of gossip. And this part can stop at nothing to get or transmit the information...

Gossips are interesting... They can improve the dynamics of a group, while at the same time, they can lead to the downfall of the group. Humans have extraordinary qualities which are utilized in even more extraordinary ways. And gossips are surely one of them...
Adios!