Buying Words
The other day, I saw two people having an argument over a tea stall in a train station. From what I can decipher, the men didn’t know each other. They had a fight over a biscuit packet, I guess, the last pack, the tea stall could offer.
I overheard the conversations, or to say arguments. The air carried them to the fellow onlookers, like me. The men were being rude with each word that they were spilling out. None of them were willing to serve a silent treatment or simply withdraw from the ongoing ‘getting on nerves’ situation.
Fortunately, they only exchanged words to heat up the argument and not the bodily mechanism.
The tea vendor, acting as a protagonist, tried to stop the two men, but the argument got out of his control.
Nobody dared to stop the two or actually stand between them or maybe take one of them away. The crowd escalated, murmurs took over, some spectators went ahead with their lives, while some were still ready to witness the whole drama.
Placed on the stairs, some 200 meters away from the tea stall, I was just wondering how speaking up for oneself has become a status of self-respect. Of the two men, who were involved in gathering complete strangers over a tea stall with all eyes glued to them, none of the two men was ready to give up on words.
None wanted to let go of the situation. They were fighting for their self-respect. Amid the whole conversation warming up and the scream of policemen, which was again carried by the summer wind, people decided to dissolve. Both the men stood up and moved diagonally as if they were promising to never cross paths again.
The scene dissipated. People moved on with their daily lives. I took my next step. As I was moving forward, a thought landed in my mind- How about if people were chargeable in terms of money for the number of words they speak per day?
How about we have a system to not be wasteful with our words anymore? How about we promise to save more of them?
Wouldn’t that make for a peaceful planet?
Think about it.
