The fight to keep talking: The vital art of conversation

Unlike WhatsApp and social media, conversation demands our full attention and requires a response from us which is often revealing.

- Rohit Brijnath

Onto the hard benches nailed to the sides of the ambulance slid a stranger. It was late October 2019, winter starting to nudge autumn aside, and my father's body was being taken to the cemetery in the northern India town where he lived.

It's one of life's profound moments, your father gone, mute before you in a coffin, on a journey back into the earth. And so on this hectic day, which was fading into a blur, I shrugged at the stranger's appearance. But this month in India, years later, I asked my cook, who had sat beside me in the ambulance, about that man.

"Who was he?"

"The auto (taxi) driver from across the street," he replied.