Aur Bataa

It’s a bright sunny day and you are feeling good at office, at college or even relaxing at home. Suddenly breaking the silence around you, your phone rings. The ring tone is your favorite obviously. You know the caller, a good friend at that. You start chatting nips and bits. Small talk – how’s life, how’s work/college. Nothing major or substantial. Then you (or the caller) utter the words. If you do say/hear them, then congratulations you too have been affected by the deadly virus doing the rounds. People call it by different names but I like to call it the ‘Aur Bataa’ virus.
This is that phase of the conversation when actually you have nothing important to talk about with the other person. You can pretend to support various topics to prolong the talk, but in reality you have no idea about what you are doing. You are drifting. You called up the person just for the heck of it. After all what did you expect? He will break down in front of you with all his problems looking for comfort in return or rather start blabbering about every small thing they did or saw in the day right from brushing teeth to getting to bed.
In today’s time people keep so much to themselves it would be foolhardy to accept a very meaningful talk with someone who is not amongst your closest group. Even then there is the chance of upsetting a closed one and hence opinions and views are further curtailed. Coming back to point, we’ve grown accustomed to using this phrase that I’ve started to wonder that have we actually run out of things to talk about. I can’t remember one conversation with my friends (phone/mail) where under 5-10 minutes I hadn’t used ‘Aur Bataa’, ditto for others too.
This epidemic has brought up another question to my mind that has the new way of life of this generation led to a mass disinterest in the art of talking? Although tit seems highly unlikely, what with the subscription nos. for telecom companies hitting the roof. So what is it that is spreading this virus? A question that is more of a mystery than the most mysterious question of them al. Hell, even writing about it here has left me with very little things to talk about. I can’t seem to think up of anything new to add to what I’ve already written and I can see myself saying the same two words – “Aur Bataa.”