India, May 17 -- Conversations tend to meander. There's no telling where they might end up. There's a Hindi saying about a poet being able to access realms that even solar rays cannot reach. Conversations can similarly traverse the length, breadth, expanse, and even the tiniest minute detail of life. Our thoughts are restless at best and incorrigible at worse. To reign them in is an impossible task, even, or especially, when one is trying to meditate. And conversations can be almost as uncontained as thoughts. With only the filter of prudence, or the semblance of it, being a plausible restrainer. Allow me to illustrate the point. A couple of friends were talking about the art of decoupage a few days ago. They were truly in the thick of it, with the niceties and nuances of the paper-cutting art being discussed threadbare. I was listening in, not with any modicum of expertise, but with the wide-eyed interest of a layperson. An important enough call broke through the decoupage-induced trance, and I was off for precisely two minutes, in order to attend to it. Imagine my sense of sheer surprise when I found the same twosome discussing stories from the scriptures with some intensity, as I returned to the room. The mention of decoupage, or even of its distant avatars, was nowhere to be heard, anymore. They were on about self-realisation, introspection, aboveness, detachment and spiritual surrender! And while I gawked and listened in unabashedly, they somehow turned their attention, within fleeting moments, to Netflix and all kinds of horror films! Super intelligent people, no doubt. But to criss-cross the entire horizon of human existence at the speed of light was quite a feat. Yet, if one pretends to be the proverbial fly on the wall, one will realise that many a confabulation between friends with idle time can feel akin to a journey around the planet and across time spans, rolled into one. From laptops to ice cream, from commerce to fine art, from avocado toast to elephants in the room and from gossip to more gossip, there's no stopping a pair of minds, or a group of them, when they come together. Our own thoughts are often even more adventurous. When we try to calm them and proceed to essay a beginner's primer of meditation, we hear a vegetable vendor promising to supply us with the choicest of luscious mangoes. We then start wondering why the same king of fruits was not at its best the previous evening, when we'd tucked into it. And then our thoughts might turn to the fact that India does not import more than a small fraction of its mangoes. The global economy, war, pathetic global leaders, their hairstyles, their gaffes, and endless other distractors will commence their assault on our nascent attempts at inner peace. The world is such an entertaining mix of the beautiful and the bizarre, that our minds, our thoughts and our conversations have very little chance of stabilising themselves. According to a write-up by Lucy Foulkes, published in Psyche magazine, most of us crave meaningful conversations, but end up mostly indulging in small talk. Yet, research by top universities also indicates that the so-called habit of indulging in small talk, adds volumes to our mental health. Even if we, like the British, go on discussing the weather, our mind feels satiated, compared to a mind that is lonely. But if we crave meaningful, uninhibited, unlimited conversations that truly enhance our perspectives, we cannot be prone to frequent distractions. In order to dive deep into a topic, one would have to eliminate distractions, at least for substantial periods of time. Even our beloved coffee, and the superiority of it, as also preferences of temperature in the room, can be attention grabbers that force us away from truly deep conversations. This writer has often mentioned the need for far more frequent conversations with those who truly matter to us. Texting, somehow, is not even half as fulfilling a mode of interaction, as is the actual voicing of thoughts. Many essential conversations remain unendingly pending, though. Putting them off often annihilates them altogether. We need to have them before it's too late....