Manu Joseph: Taking risks while making small talk can turn conversations interesting

In my ideal world, people will not say, “So what do you do?" and look behind me for something more interesting, which there usually is. In my ideal world, I will ask people, “What’s your uric acid level?" And they will tell me their level without surprise, and then I will ask for their whole lipid profile and the medication they might be taking. This is more interesting to me than what people normally say.

Okay, I am bad at small talk. People who say this usually say it with an undercurrent of pride, as though they are precious and the fact that they are bad at small talk is somehow a sign of intelligence. But I really want to be good at small talk. Should it be so dreadful?

I have come to realize that small talk cannot be avoided. It is a way of life. We cannot dance in the air to get to know each other; we can only speak. And there is that first time. Strangers are the background extras in the engrossing stories of our lives, which have very few central characters; even so, we must speak to them.

I have wondered if there is a better way to do small talk. Some people appear to be naturally good at it, they can hold a conversation for a long time with people they have just met.

But I have eavesdropped thousands of times and these conversations are all dreary. They make obvious observations through elaborate sentences, repeating something they have read; often, they are just plain wrong. A common ice-breaker is bad-mouthing the food or the host. Perhaps it is not that these people are good at small talk, but that some people have a high tolerance for dull conversations.

For most of human history, there was no small talk. Most people in this world, even today, do not have to indulge in it. Villagers and the poor do not do small talk. It is only a small class of people who perform this unnatural thing. But it need not be this way.

Recently, when I was speaking to a corporate guy and we figured we had nothing more to say to each other, I did finally ask, “What’s your uric acid level?"

I had a recurring vision for months that this is the sort of thing I should ask strangers. To me, uric acid was a metaphor for the outer limit of a probing but decent question to a stranger. I had not expected myself to ask this literally. But I had a hunch the corporate guy would be the sort of person who would know his numbers. He did, and we had a rich conversation about his lipid profile too, and how some modern medicine is not only for the sick but even for the fit. I didn’t have to reveal anything about myself; content in the entertainment of being asked about himself, he had no curiosity about me.

I feel that small talk can be meaningful, hence even interesting, if we take the risk of appearing somewhat unsophisticated. This is something I learnt from unsophisticated people in affluent settings, whom I find immensely interesting. In this exercise, what I have faith in is the element of risk. Every time any sort of risk is involved, I know something good can come out of it.

It is not that people do not employ questions during small talk. In fact, all of small talk is Q&A. Also, ‘ask questions to sound interesting’ is a technique popularized by the self-help pandemic, which may have no cure. But these questions are still very peripheral and dull, especially because people evidently realize that the questionnaire has very little interest in what you are saying.

In doing small talk, I feel that the idea is not to be interesting, but to make the other person genuinely interesting. And I have come to the conclusion that there is no other way to do that than by speaking to strangers as though they are not strangers.

You might be thinking, why put all this effort to avoid the numbing boredom of small talk? Can’t I just stand with a drink, say “What’s up," like other people, look behind a person, nod absent-mindedly, and be off? Also, women may not want to appear so interested in strangers, for that could lead to misunderstandings.

Even so, I feel that strangers who will soon vanish are an underrated attraction of life. We engage with life through people and at various levels of familiarity. Speaking to a stranger can be a rich experience even if they are ordinary.

In fact, in seeking good small talk, we must not seek out the beautiful and the famous. We are not seeking a future spouse. There must be no material ambition in small talk. The strangers could be people unworthy of knowing deeply; they could be cruel and other such things, but it really does not matter for a transient conversation.

The biggest problem with seeking some meaning in small talk is not making people speak truths about themselves, but the sudden awkward silences. In all of life, there is nothing much to say. The more we know someone the more quiet we are when we are with them. Yet, silences have been defamed as signs of boredom, which they often are not. Nor do they mean you have run out of things to say. They are pauses so that the eyes can rest in other places.

Maybe I will create a new social language where one stranger can tell another, “We have gone quiet, but that is for the mind to recoup; I’m not bored at all."

But the most important part of good small talk is that when you do run out of things, you just move on. You are here only to briefly get into the minds of people, not to collect people for your funeral.

The author is a journalist, novelist, and the creator of the Netflix series, ‘Decoupled’