For about a year or so, I had been interacting with two young men on a group in WhatsApp. My contributions usually being witty or pithy comments with a great deal of detachment whereas theirs, more involved and passionate. The group is our local Alumni Association’s with membership running across a wide spectrum of age, gender, experience and ideologies. On an impulse, I had suggested a personal meeting to one of them last week and he readily agreed. Not only did he agree but, he also wondered if he could bring along another member, a colleague and personal friend of his. Having interacted with the other as well on WhatsApp, I readily agreed and they both called on me last evening.
They stayed for a couple of highly stimulating hours which I thoroughly enjoyed and they assured me before leaving that they did too.
The combined age of the two equals mine, or, in other words, both are half my age. Their world view and experiences are vastly different to what was mine at that age and the stresses and problems that they have to handle simply did not exist for me at that age. This remarkable difference in our life situations occupied most of our discussions and for me at least, it was a learning experience which, no amount of news paper or periodicals reading would have given me.
Apart from such commonalities, the two had very different social backgrounds which in turn impact their current life styles in different ways but, in more of an understandable way as, these are universal and quite obvious.
One of the young men, let us call him AK is a blogger and reads my blogs every day as do I his posts. Apart from the traditional gifts people take when they visit someone, AK brought a gift wrapped parcel for me which he presented to me before leaving with the ominous comment, “I hope that you enjoy this Sir! I found it very helpful.”
And that is the book that appears alongside. Before I decided on quite how to treat the book, I investigated the author and read up some reviews of the book and then sent off the book for binding as I do to books that I intend reading and keeping for repeated reference. My investigations as well as the first few pages that I glanced through before I sent it off for binding assures me that it will be interesting and I look forward to reading it soon.
Since AK is bound to read this post, my question to him is “What makes you think that I either don’t or, do?” I hope that he will respond either off blog or here in the comments. In case he does off blog to remain anonymous, I shall share his response with my readers through another blog post.
Comments are closed.