Dialogue and Conversation

Here, I present my understanding of dialogue and conversation in a comparative manner that is both descriptive and prescriptive. I attempt to assimilate what these two modes of communication are and what they ought to be. To me, dialogue concerns the exchange of thoughts; thoughts here possess a recognisable independence from their presenters. Dialogue is therefore essentially impersonal. In it, participants prioritise thoughts over human beings as they are: over how they feel, behave, or situate themselves emotionally.

Conversation, by contrast, begins with the acceptance of the person, and only thereafter do participants immerse themselves in what they share through expressions. Here, people take cognisance of one another as fellow human beings and respond with caring, sympathy, and attentiveness. Though these two forms of communication belong to different domains of human life, broadly speaking, dialogue pertains to public life, while conversation belongs to the private and personal sphere.

What I urge here is the need to bring the spirit of conversation into public dialogues, which I here conflate with debates and discourses. However, getting into a conversation on public issues is an exceedingly difficult task and remains a rarity. I identify several factors behind this crisis of people not being genuinely conversant with one another.

The first factor is obvious: poor education. Many lack command over language and suffer from inadequate knowledge. Yet this is the smallest hindrance. The more critical impediment arises from ideologies that respond to existential anxieties and from the manner in which these ideologies are appropriated. Another overlapping, but more general, hindrance is the sway of instinctive, bestial drives wrapped in the language of values. These drives are sustained and legitimised by a form of contrived intellectualism, which supplies ready-made justifications and shallow abstractions. This results in a vicious circle in which such values and contrived intellectual inputs enter, reinforce, and circulate within the socialisation processes of communities.

A knowing person, therefore, cannot enjoy the ease of conversation in public dialogues; instead, engagement in such conversations becomes a burden. It is the burden of being in the know and of remaining corrective while conversing on public issues, yet doing so without becoming condescending or imposing.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Conversations

Conversations among folks go into holding or advancing social norms and practices. Republicanism bestows citizens the responsibility to hone their conversation skills to the effect of social good. The primary thing is to see the relevance of a conversation, its content and the way we do it, whether it serves or disserves us. We must know that things savoury or unsavoury, the biggest of them spanning nationally or internationally included, exist by existing in the microcosms of interpersonal relations among common folks. We can augment or contain their effect by how we converse. Another point to put here is that a conversation about a condition is basic for the recognition of that condition. My brushes with history introduced me to great and deafening silences over phenomena, which affected humanity and its course very deeply. Avoiding than conversing about some conditions has been the norm. Conversation for advancement is a courageous act.

Niraj Kumar Jha

On Conversation

Conversation is about the polite and appreciative sharing of feelings and ideas. This is the way of being human, and being into it is a very humanising process. 

While a conversation is about interpersonal sympathies and intimacies, as it appears and is so, it also has profound implications for the political life of a community. It is a beautiful experience but has very powerful underpinnings. A citizenry with a cultivated art of good talking to each other makes a great republic. It brings in mutual understanding and general awareness; persons conversing facilitate each other and take their commonwealth forward.

People can get trained in debating, oratory, or rhetoric but fine conversation comes to one from their culture. A refind culture is the making of the good sense of the generations. But we can always make up for the time by merely being conscious of the need. A path that leads to a destination, is a part of that destination.

Niraj Kumar Jha