International call

It's not always that you get an appointment with your school friend for an online interview from Ireland. And so when the opportunity came , I didn't want to shy away from it.

I hadn't met him in 6 years despite having shared a fascination for fiction, sports and the arts.  We supported the same cricketers, enjoyed the privilege of mutual friendships and sported the same orange house t shirts at school ( completely unrelated to political ideologies)

We even finished a fiery hundred metre race neck to neck that it was such that ,  neither of us won nor lost , but still emerged victorious.
We fought the same fights and shared devilish gossip.

But yes, he always sported a much better hairstyle than mine considering the fact that my scalp was running devoid of it's priceless clothing. Whether that fact must even be considered while talking about hairstyles is quite a dilemma since my obvious disadvantage deprives  him of adequate competition.

The Skype call connected and I was welcomed with a familiar face, half of which was covered with unkempt hair.
I sensed defeat and pulled mine up and for remainder of the conversation never looked down.

The pleasantries followed. I had returned home from work and thoughts of a sick patient back at the hospital usually keeps me up for an hour. I  had finished my dinner without much delay, charged my phone, told my parents to not call me for anything (unless they aren't sure of how to close an app on the phone which is making loud noise )and sat down with utmost leisure.

He was doing a course at Ireland and was conducting an online interview to ascertain social networking usage with regard to political content sharing.

He administered his structured questionnaire which was in three parts. They were open ended questions and I found myself thinking more than usual while trying to give a genuine answer.
It was a time of introspection where I was looking at my own ideas about social networking and trying to reason out the impact it had on me over the last few years. I realised I had so much more to say and that random examples were coming to mind on listening to certain questions. 

I had to sound educated and I was surprised at how I could find standard English words for most of my thoughts on a topic that I had never given much thought.

The process lasted for about 30 minutes and at the end of it I had realised more than one thing.

It had always struck me but yesterday more than ever, that a good chunk of my emotions and ideals were driven by listening to ghastly opinion of other people and deciding against it. It had helped me rule out how I didn't want to be or sound like.

It struck me even harder that I was more grown up than what I had imagined. Offering my ideas on political posts and it's impact on my life wasn't probably the ideal bed time activity for a 23 year old.

The official call ended and we spoke for a few minutes about the plight of the Indian cricket team.

The difference in the time zone forced me to stop the conversation and after making an hopeful promise of staying in touch on WhatsApp I retired for the day.