The art of success lies in saying as little as possible. That is what carried Mrs Gandhi and Narasimha Rao through.
I have just taken my bath, I declared. The wife looked quizzically, as if to say, so what, and continued to glance through the page three of the popular paper. Then, not much later, it intoned again in the same declarative voice, I am going in for my breakfast. This time she could not stay quiet and replied, I know that, I have just served it.
So, it went on through the better part of the morning, my declaring at every stage what I was about to do and then narrating in the shortest of sentences what I had just been up to. The problem came up when I had something longish to say, like the menu of a somewhat sumptuous breakfast. How do you compress it into a short sentence or two. But I managed, using all the skills acquired through a lifetime of copy editing and trying to write in the minimum number of words possible.
The game went on through the morning and right into early evening when she came back from office. In between, when she was not there, I naturally did not speak out loud what I was about to do, doing or had just done, simply formulated the sentences in my mind.
Particularly challenging was getting together my comments on major news items of the day culled from the over half a dozen papers that I regularly glance through. Having been a scribe for long, I naturally had a lot to say and wanted to spell it out at reasonable length. But the discipline of length cut me short. So, what would have been a full-length editorial comment of over 500 words was shrunk to just around 30 odd, beginning with something as sharp as “DMK meets its comeuppance…”
Then, in the evening, after we had finished our tea and I solemnly declared that “I have made a good cup of tea for us”, the wife’s attempt at nonchalance gave way. You better stop this charade or explain what great show you are trying to stage, she ordered. I put on an air of the utmost innocence and replied, Can’t you see, no comment of mine is more than 140 characters long?
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What character, whose character, she asked. I am practicing what I will put out soon when I will get on Twitter, you t…, managing to swallow that word at the last moment. Relief descended on her face as she ordered me to keep my twittering to my electronic devices and not announce them to the world.
But that is precisely what you are meant to do on Twitter, I have been told by the most reliable sources. You are supposed to announce what you are doing every hour or so, leaving out of course if you have just gone round the corner. But few people follow that sort of schedule by the hour, except if they are film stars, she argued.
Then what do you tweet about, unless it is meaningless bits of trivia, which no sensible person should be interested in. It takes me the better part of a day to research and write an editorial and after that I feel quite exhausted and emptied out, convinced that I will have nothing more to say for some time to come. I don’t know, she said, ask those who tweet, she declared and went off towards the kitchen to drum up some dinner, leaving me to reflect in the peace of silence (I had decided to give up all ideas of tweeting) on the follies of all the new fads that ride in on the back of every new device.
I must confess that I decided to try out tweeting on seeing the troubles Sushma Swaraj had got into by letting the prime minister off the hook in her tweet. If she can tweet then I surely can, I thought with all the male chauvinism that I could muster as Women’s Day approached. Then seeing her travails over the next few days with her party colleagues for having spoken out of turn, I had second thoughts. But the MCP in one doesn’t die so easily and I was determined I would do better than her.
Having seen Sushma Swaraj's travails, I should have known, and having seen the travails of Sashi Tharoor, who laid the foundations of his loss of ministership with the brick and mortar of his smart Alac tweets, she should have known. And both of them, having studied India’s recent politics and the styles of its successful practitioners should have known that the art of success lies in saying as little as possible. That is what carried Mrs Gandhi and Narasimha Rao through, not to speak of M G Ramachandran who ruled from his sick bet so effectively by saying so little because he could not say more.
Vindication of sorts came when I read in the papers that the rise of tweeting had led to the decline of blogging. Of course, even I knew that people held forth much longer but at far longer intervals in their blogs. Still, when blogs came I was determined not to get enmeshed in that folly because, in all honesty, I have so little to say. Once I have written a column or something else I feel drained out for the next 36 hours.
But still, old men typically want to try out a new fad once in a while. What almost got me into serious trouble (the reaction of my wife to the sample fare I produced cured me of the temptation) was the irrepressible thought that if a t… like Sushma Swaraj can, then so can I!