Breaking the Ice

You enter the crowded room, arm yourself with something cold, and move towards a neutral corner of the room to rally your senses. Suddenly you’re intercepted by your host, who grips your arm rather tightly. As he guides you across the room and says’ “ I am dying for you to meet someone”, you wonder why the host should die in order for me to meet this ‘someone’. Seconds later you are face to face with a stranger, whose name you didn’t quite hear and whose face has just clouded over with the look usually reserved for suspected airplane hijackers. Meanwhile your host has disappeared off to mismatch two other poor souls, and you are left to your own devices. After you have repeated the introductions to get the names straight, (you don’t want to go through your life as Deepak when you are not known by that name), sorted out how each of you came to know the host, and agreed that it is warm in here, you discover you have left your other devices at home.

Sounds familiar?. That’s because breaking the ice is a social skill that ranks right up there with the ability to hum, accurately a twenty year Mohd Rafi song. And one encounters this very frequently. Custom has it that how you break ice depends on the sex of the other party. A man is a potential rival, a woman a potential someone you can later brag about. If it’s a man, talk about sports and job. If it’s a woman solicit her opinion on the networks bidding for the new film or TV show you are soon to be producing. (anything to make you shine).

No more. A large social gathering is difficult enough to handle without turning it into a school yard fight. From now on no separate conversational gambits for men or women. After all, your only goal should be to stimulate a few minutes of pleasant conversation. Power and sex can wait.

The best way to move things off dead center is with a non-threatening question. “What do you do” is too blunt. The other person might hate his or her current job, or --- worse still --- might just have lost it. Politics or religion is off limits, until you determine that the person has any such interests. Specific questions (“Do you think Seema has grown up”?), about movies, art, theatre and music are premature, and general queries (“Do you like movies”?) make you sound like a simpleton stumped for anything to say.

The best icebreaker, in an age when everybody is always informed and moving around is “Where are you from?”. Geography is the most neutral of subjects, but is pregnant with conversational possibilities. Finding out that somebody has moved here from Delhi three years ago, or grew up in Calcutta, or has just got back from Dubai, opens up a whole range of secondary questions, allows you to compare impressions of places, where paths may have crossed, and prompts you both to explain how you came to be where you are. More than this just depends upon chemistry.

So dear partygoers, enjoy and go ahead and have fun.



(Retd)