For years, I had watched my dad tell the same Army story whenever there was a family get-together. It is the recounting of a terrifying battle scene. On most occasions, his audience never let him finish his story. He seemed to forget that it was mostly a civilian gathering, and the military jargon would go over their heads.
My disciplined dad expected total silence and undivided attention. But getting everybody quiet could take up half the evening. I could sense his exasperation. Here he was in the penultimate part of the story, the build-up to the terrifying finish — the battle scene where the enemy’s artillery shell lands on his vehicle he had got out of, a minute ago. But even before he finishes, the restless audience breaks up randomly, as though artillery shells had landed in their middle, in slow motion.
And as dad grew old, he forgot the number of times he narrated the same story to the same audience. Later on, as he got older, in his increasingly recurring senior moments, he forgot what he had started out to say.
Attention spans have plummeted. I have watched get-togethers of school and college friends, Army colleagues and bankers. It is competitive in a peer group, with everyone jumping in with comments. The audience is only looking for that split-second gap to butt in and narrate their own — and in their minds, a lot better — story. The survival trick is to raise your volume a bit, gesture a lot, keep the storytelling going non-stop, and never ever pause for breath.
Cacophony prevails
The default safety clause of any storytelling is, “Stop me if you’ve heard this before”, knowing it’s not likely to happen. Yet, it is impossible to totally stop attempts at sabotage by those who have actually heard it before. These saboteurs will show their insider status by chuckling along condescendingly, and finishing his sentences for him, which spooks the speaker into racing through to the end and messing it up. The one-upmanship never ends. Only a seasoned raconteur can side-step interruptions and end his stories with a bang.
In our storytelling, we try to shape the incidents in our lives into well-rounded episodes, and foist our stories with a beginning, middle, and an end, as though our lives were movies. We try to make sense of events and summarise, as it were, our experience, but life defies summary or an ordered arrangement. It is random by default. We look over our shoulders nervously for that random child who may ask us a deceptively simple question in public, like, “What have you done in your life?” Or something similar. Suddenly the hall goes quiet, the adults in the vicinity sympathetically look at a man trying to define his life at such short notice, tying himself in knots, in profuse perspiration.
So we practise storytelling all the time, packaging and branding ourselves, hoping our lives add up to something significant, something cosmic and more magnificent than this sideshow of a universe with its zillion galaxies and exploding supernovas.
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