These my habits, I lend to you

Every day as we go about our lives, we pick up ‘signatures’ from others that unknowingly become part of our style whether in speech or gestures.  When you spend a lot of time with a particular person, you unconsciously pick up their mannerism down to all the minutest inflection.

 You’ve been observing and absorbing their behaviours,  gestures and style from the sidelines, sometimes even making fun of them, when one day, suddenly out to the blue, you say something and your mind pulls the brakes and you have the “what the hell just happened” expression on your face. You’ve just reacted like some you know.

A few days ago, I caught myself saying, and with all the style that this colleague does, “One day I will kill him, literally” and I went Whoa! All this time I’ve been laughing at him and mocking him and here I was saying his stupid little sentence. Even the exclamations and interjections we pepper our daily interactions with tend to get coloured by the company we keep.

Over the years, I’ve picked up words like ‘babes’ from a client’s assistant who would call me every hour (which I have happily shed now), ‘pavam’ (poor boy) from a friend and words like ‘aiyo’, ‘aiya’ and other culturally influenced words. At times, I’ve caught myself leaping, clapping and doing random body gestures that were never part of my limited mannerisms, and when I do catch myself mid-(said borrowed)gesture I can only speculate which of my friends I have to thank for polluting what should have been my unique reaction.

Sometimes, these unconscious pick-ups also extends to laughter. Yes, laughter. Funny as it may seem, my laugh over time has changed, depending on the company I keep. My laugh has always been loud, gurgling and unstoppable; sometimes my close mouthed laugh resembles a ‘puppy yelping’ (or so I have been told among other not so polite descriptions),  so when I find another kind of laugh coming out, I stop and reexamine who I’ve been spending time with. I love my laugh, and I draw the line at my laugh descending into a witch-like cackle or a hamming villain from a C-grade Hindi film.