Intelligence is a tricky business. It has so many forms, avenues and specialties that a man intelligent with calculus might be miserable with social relations. Dexter famously (or maybe its just me) didn’t know the sum of two and two even though he had solved Einstein’s E=MC square.

I have heard it being said in my family circles and in and around so much, that being intelligent with people (this is the more academic way to put it, the common term is “baatho” or perhaps “fast” in the pace of interactions) is a must have to survive in the cut throat world, especially the city where the competition is high and trickery and lies (flat out, subdued, white, black, doesn’t matter) have permeated into the fabric of survival. I bring this “intelligence” here, out of the said many forms, mostly because I relate to it a lot. Mainly though in terms of lacking it.

I have always been a studious kind of a person. I scored good marks all the way up to the iron gates, then further on still until I got out of my high school. These days my studies have wandered away from the strict text books I so religiously followed all the while growing up, but still, I am okay. I am said to be mildly intelligent with matters of academia and such.

But I don’t know if it was this single minded focus for the written word, or what, which turned me kind of dumb when it comes to society. It makes one clumsy I have realized, this lack of social understanding, you trip a lot: you fail to estimate people and situations as much as you might have liked to, it shows in your body language in the timidity of your voice even, sometimes. I am not bad with people I know and am very good with the small number of friends I have come to accumulate over the years, but I am blank to varying degrees when it comes to new circles, growing acquaintances.

Someone younger to me that I know once asked me what it meant to be “baatho” in society. It is purely the superiority of my age that S. comes to ask me these kinds of questions sometimes, thinking perhaps, that I might have answers. I think my beard betrays my lack of knowledge.

A lot of the times I don’t have an answer or a definite one and I go around it, I build words and turn the question into a mark, I chew it and distort it to change its face and present it as a solution (I once used the word “socio-economic drivers” while vaguely in the under-capacity of my knowledge, explaining something). So to this too, while perfectly knowing that I had little clue about it, and whatever I did know I had no capacity to implement its meaning in my life, I explained to him, patiently giving examples of some of the quick ones from our common acquaintances, and of some not so quick ones.

Today reflecting, as I write this piece, I realize I had been the baatho one there, in front of the young fellow. So I have at least a kind of a definition now. Being the faster guy doesn’t mean having answers, but being the louder one with a wall of straw confidence.

Chiya-Pasaley loves tea and writes about conversations that originate along the hours spent on drinking many cups of it. Besides that he is curious about many things and especially the rural-urban divide, and the coming of modernization to Nepal. He writes on the mundane and the very fantastic, and everything in between.