There were many instances on this holiday, where I felt like a big-eyed first bencher, absorbing in abundance from the place and its people. The greatest proof of its success, however, was on the 5-hour flight back when I couldn’t sleep a wink, too excited to get back and start working on Joylogues with fresh passion and conviction.

Most of my life, I dwindled away this gift of words in meaningless conversations that didn’t create any real change. Conversations meant gossip, vainly discussing other people, lamenting over how tough life is and then, more of the same. But words have the power to move mountains. Words of genuine encouragement can drive someone to change the course of history!

“How you talk to yourself decides how you feel about yourself and others. It influences the choices you make about big and little things. It determines the actions you consider essential and the ones you consider dangerous, the desires you honour and the ones you repress, the plans you make for days to come and the lessons you learn from days gone.”

“The problem with free will is easily felt. Perhaps the world is a deterministic system. This means that its state at any time is controlled by its state at some earlier time, and so on back for ever”. Ashutosh and Kritika discuss the question of choice and whether we are truly free.

“Boosting one’s public image won’t help when the problem is self-image.” How often do we say or do things to look better in the eyes of others? Very. But nothing can be more misdirected. No amount of external adulation will fill the gaps that lie deep within. Gaps that we even refuse to acknowledge. No wonder, we’re unhappy and we don’t even know why.

Given that conversation is so fundamental to our being, it is illogical that we don’t make more conscious efforts to train our children, or even ourselves in it. Award-winning journalist, author and speaker Celeste Headlee shares 10 ways through which we can have better, more meaningful conversations.

“We often worry about our past and are hopeful about our future but do very little in the present. I realised that the best way to have a good today is to start from the realisation that I am doing better than good and better than most. I start the day on a positive note and then from there on, it gets better.”

“That one conversation resulted in hundreds of clients in Galway, that one conversation resulted in thousands of clients online, that one conversation resulted in a quarter of a million for charity, that one conversation resulted in 200,000 people a day now seeing my updates about hope, and belief, and belonging, and all these things every day.”

When I was experimenting on the direction Joylogues will take, I had requested for support on my social media platforms. Since I loved books, I thought it’ll be a good idea to get people together and get them to speak about books that they like or are currently reading, one-on-one. With Vikrant and Mansi, came into a being the following dialogue on the book Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari.

Conversations, while they happen at a certain point, have eternal life. Mostly, they stay with us as memories, either warm and pleasant, or difficult and inconvenient. But the most valuable dialogues don’t just remain static remembrances; they evolve with time. Their echo can be heard and felt long after their physical occurrence is over.