Where are you from?

Hullo everyone it’s been a long time since I posted here.  I guess it was back in January. These months have been busy as TOCG had moved from New delhi to Mumbai and took me some time to settle in and get in the groove of writing. 

Coming to Mumbai and meeting up with new people and making new friends is an amazing experience, it always is a great and happy experience to meet new people, share experiences, and ultimately make new friends. Though these friends may not meet you ever again in your life but it always is a great experience making friends.

Talking about making friends the first step is getting to know people, and how do we get know people? Yes by striking up a conversation. We all have different ways of starting a conversation; of course actions also play a great part here. ‘Offering biscuits for example along with the mid-journey tea on a train’ is one such way. At least this is what I do during my train journeys and yes I do look forward keenly to these train journeys and it gives me a great sense of happiness when I pack my bag with a packet of hide& seek.  

Though exchanging pleasantries is a very important part of the conversation as it bridges that gap of being unknown to each other, the subsequent lines or in some cases actions that follow are also very important because this is where the experiences start building from and to start that part of conversation we use a very common question

“where are you from?”

The question though looks very simple and it is obvious that the person being asked the question would have the answer and would not mind giving it out. But if we look at the question and the feelings that arise right after it’s answered, usually we make a impression about the person on the basis of the region that he/she belongs to though most of us have this feeling for a moment and by the time we come to know the person a little better we give up the so aroused regionalism in our minds and carry on with the conversation. But as we all know that it is these tiny tattered bits of regionalism that come to the fore during the bad times and take over our brains and make us regionalist, communalist, racist and what not.
As we see now the nation united by the spirit of independence and the zeal to weed out corruption by its very roots and have a great country come back to glory, Just decide and make a solemn effort to think before and not after we ask the question “where are you from?”