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Apparently, there are as many as 880 spoken languages in India, out of which 31 languages have been given an official status. To hear, decode, process, understand, speak, wait for the next person to decode your message, process, understand and then reply is to have a conversation.
When business leaders ask me what they can do for Indiana, I always reply: 'Make money. Go make money. That's the first act of corporate citizenship. If you do that, you'll have to hire someone else, and you'll have enough profit to help one of those non-profits we're so proud of.'
Now we're e-mailing and tweeting and texting so much, a phone call comes as a fresh surprise. I get text messages on my cell phone all day long, and it warbles to alert me that someone has sent me a message on Facebook or a reply or direct message on Twitter, but it rarely ever rings.
When people question me too much, I generally ask them if such rules are applicable to someone like actor Mammootty. They reply, Mammootty is a man and you are a woman. You aren't supposed to do certain things.' And I go like, Why not? Are there separate rules for Muslim men and women?'
I am a great believer in the OHIO principle: Only handle it once. When you read an e-mail, decide whether or not to reply to it, and, if you need to reply, do so right then and there. I have found that about 80 percent of all e-mails, whether internal or external, do not require a response.
I love some of the most hateful tweets. I think they're very funny. In the negative attacks on me, there are frequently some real displays of humor. I want to reply, but I won't, because there are all sorts of other people making serious points that I care about, and I don't want them to be discouraged.
Nobody in the developing world is going to take, as an answer to their aspirations, the developed world's reply: 'Sorry, you can't; we've already used it all up.' To earn the right to look the developing world in the eye and start this conversation, we need a reassessment of how we live and what we want.
My very first movie, 'Mary Poppins,' which I talk about, it just turned me into an obsessive, creative creature who had to sort of reply to the experience by drawing things, making things. It was like it forced - it made me into this obsessive, creative creature... I don't know any other way of putting it.
I get home from work at six or seven. When I'm busy, I set my alarm for three, get out of bed at quarter past three. I have a cup of tea and read a magazine and take the dogs for a walk up the lane. Go through my text messages and reply to anything that needs it, then get my biking gear on ready to cycle to work.
If you're saying something that people don't want to hear or accept, a significant proportion of them will reply with hostility. Not because they know the facts, or because they have researched it themselves, but because they're so psychologically involved in believing good news that they will oppose it with a reflex.
In London the day after Christmas (Boxing Day), it began to snow: my first snow in England. For five years, I had been tactfully asking, 'Do you ever have snow at all?' as I steeled myself to the six months of wet, tepid gray that make up an English winter. 'Ooo, I do remember snow,' was the usual reply, 'when I were a lad.'
If someone were to say that life at hard labor is as painful as death and therefore equally cruel, I should reply that, taking all the unhappy moments of perpetual slavery together, it is perhaps even more painful, but these moments are spread out over a lifetime, and capital punishment exercises all its power in an instant.
I've developed a fun text when a friend has just had a baby. I ask a classic question: 'Are you sleeping?' The reply is inevitably that they aren't, they're getting a few hours here and there, they're exhausted. It's then when I swoop in: 'It'll all be worth it when they're softly stroking your hair as you slip into oblivion.'
One thing I like to do is visit technical forums and ask for help regarding an entirely fictitious problem I'm having with my software. When I receive help, I say, 'Nope. Didn't work.' If they guide me to a button to click, I say, 'Nope. Can't see it.' Sometimes I just reply with nothing but 'Nope,' and it drives them up the wall.
At Liverpool, I used to read the match day programme, and you'd read an interview with a lad from the youth team. They'd ask age, heroes, strong points, etc. He'd reply, 'Shooting and tackling.' I can't get into my head that football development would educate tackling as a quality, something to learn, to teach, a characteristic of your play.
If someone hurts me on social media, I want to tell them that they've hurt me. I believe you should say what you're feeling. We should all do that, but what I've also realized is that even a negative comment is from a person who is trying to reach out. When I reply, maybe I'm reminding them that there's a deeper meaning to what they're doing.
