2025: The Year of Car Conversations

I muse. Often. And while I was musing over my life-sustaining elixir this morning, I realized that 2025 has really been the year of ‘car conversations’ for me.

For the uninitiated, a ‘car conversation’ is simply a conversation that you have had while in a car or while someone else is in a car and speaking with you. Now, we all drive and talk all the time; such is life. So why is this important in any way at all? Well, a conversation is more than just the act of opening our mouths and speaking…it’s an exchange of thoughts, ideas and a proper back and forth where you end up communicating things about yourself to another person/ other people. And this year, the communicating has been amped up quite a bit,

I speak to one person as part of my daily routine. She is my bestie-sister-soulmate who is halfway across the world. We usually catch up while she’s driving to work, coming back from work and this year has been one with many heartfelt talks which leave us both impacted- in more ways than one.

Another 5-day-a-week routine is catching up with my mother while I do the school run for TO. She’s usually wound up with lunch at the time I leave and our talks, filled with the mundane, the exciting and sometimes explicit, often last till I see TO making his way to the car. We exchange recipes, hopes, gossip and it always helps a girl to vent to her mother and engage in silly laughter apropos to nothing.

With TO, the car rides have bordered on the therapeutic, cathartic, heartfelt, educative (for both sides) and a lot of personal sharing which I honestly didn’t see anticipate doing with a boy child simply because he’s a boy. I guess gender stereotypes do have their hold on us; firmer than we realize.

But another aspect that makes our rides so meaningful is the inclusion of music almost from the start. TO usually has control of the playlist and we headbang, singalong or muddle our way through lyrics while we muddle our way through traffic till we reach home. And it’s been a beautiful bonding experience. Not merely because I get time with my child but there’s something about being in a closed space with a person that helps in becoming a confidant of sorts.

Everyone says that our lives are more hectic than they were a decade ago, even a couple of year ago. And while that’s true, the intrinsic need to reach out and communicate with someone hasn’t changed. The mode might have moved to Bluetooth over face-to-face but it’s not any less significant.

Who knew that the burgeoning traffic of the city would end up having a silver lining after all?