Krishna Shastri Devulapalli | The Art Of Asking The Right Questions

I was at this old bungalow with a large, tree-filled compound the other day. It’s where we buy our veggies. As I sat on a convenient tree stump, a girl of about five came skipping in. Two steps behind her was her mother.

With mother going about her shopping, and out of the way, the girl headed straight towards me purposefully. I realised what it was that she found attractive about me: the empty swing behind me. Without a single exchanged word, I was informed what my duties were. The kid got on the swing, and after both of us got an okay from her mildly embarrassed mother, I was assigned pushing duties.

Five minutes of careful, wordless swinging later, the girl gave me a big grin, jumped off the swing and proceeded to examine all that was around her — the trees, the shopping baskets, what was under the tables on which the vegetables had been displayed. A crow was chased, a slide was climbed from the side meant for sliding, and all of it done unhurriedly, methodically, thoughtfully, like it had been planned beforehand.

As the child left (after giving me a shy wave), I heard her bombarding her mom with questions.

I have this friend. Whoever he meets, within five minutes, he embarks on finding out how much that person earns, what their children are doing, what their salaries are, and how much maintenance they are paying for their apartment.

He walks nonchalantly into people’s kitchens and bedrooms and wants to know every detail of their lives. He takes great pride in knowing and remembering the most obscure details of people he last met twenty years ago. Every conversation with him is basically a questionnaire where you fill in details of net worth, the sexual orientation of your cook, which cousin of yours is related to which colleague of his, who cleans your car, where you’re planning to spend the summer...

He is a black hole where humongous amounts of data go, never to return.

When a mutual friend happened to be going through his wedding (which had taken place thirty years ago) album, this friend pointed to a photograph of an uncle and aunt (now both dead), and asked him “What were they talking about, any idea?”

I swear I am not making this up.

All of us have met both — the kid who had assigned me temporary playmate duties, and the questioner, at different times.

Why is the former charming and life-affirming and the latter unbearable? After all, they are both equally thirsty for knowledge. Is it because the first is a child, the second is a grown-ass adult, and we are more patient and forgiving of children?

Perhaps it’s because what the child displays by going to places beyond its so-called jurisdiction, taking liberties with strangers, and wanting to know everything comes from its curiosity, wonder and sense of adventure. Asking her mother those endless questions comes out of her eagerness to understand the world.

My friend doing something roughly similar, on the other hand, comes from the opposite of curiosity — nosiness. And his straying into territories, mental and physical, that he ought not to be in comes not from wonder or a sense of adventure but a lack of understanding of boundaries, and ironically enough, a learnt indifference to the world. Because what he is collecting is information, which has no intrinsic value.

Will the child I played with turn into my friend in later years? That is the question.

I think not. From the little I saw of her mother, and how she let her daughter be — while keeping an eye on her, and choosing a trustworthy temporary playmate for her — the child was permitted to be a child. That she felt free to ask her mother all those questions was another sign that she was being encouraged to be a child.

I think it is children whose curiosity, and natural sense of adventure were curbed for one reason or another, most likely by one parent or both, who turn into my friend. If you stop children from being children — childlike — they turn into childish adults, who live life asking questions they ought not to and never asking the ones they should.

Wanting endless information that adds nothing to your understanding of the world comes from fear of having to navigate those parts of your mind that you weren’t encouraged to explore as a child, and finding out things about yourself, and the world, you may not be able to deal with.

Boy, am I glad, if what has been happening all over India the last few weeks is anything to go by, that the children of the early 2000s, despite being told by parents and teachers of my generation that they ought not to be curious, accept what has been handed to them, and trust God and those who have appointed themselves God, have not allowed their natural desire to seek, question and challenge be curbed. And are continuing to look under tables, behind smokescreens, and showing us the awful truth about ourselves we have refused to see.