Terence D’Costa is a dear friend and a top notch creative in the Himalayas!

WHOSE RHETORIC IS IT ANYWAY?

Interesting how greetings have evolved with time from a genuinely enquiring “how are you” to the mandatorily flippant “sup”. Movement from interest in the person per se, to interest in the person’s world has been gradual but definite. Having realized that our social interactions rest more on the eventful world we live in, we delicately moved on from “how are you” to “how’s life” and from there, on to “how are things”. And if that wasn’t enough we’ve taken our love of things even further. After all, we did need to focus a bit more on those that may be of interest to us. So we came up with “what’s new”. Which made room for the “sup” greeting – just to cater to the present and keep things hip and simple. We’ve now relegated the “how are you” for the most infrequent and formal interactions and ‘wassup’ (read ‘waddup’ if you will) for our most repetitive ones. And if you’ve begun to imagine that this is entirely an occidental aberration with no relevance to the vernacular, don’t. Far from the spiritual goodness of “namaste”, look at the current movement from “sanchai?” (a positively wishful step warmer than the comparatively objective ‘how are you’ enquiry) to “ke chha” (a blood brother of the ‘sup). Now, that’s more than a linguistic coincidence.
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