To say that most of us are sometimes soliloquists, and some are so on more occasions than others, cannot be wrong. When bogged down in a mire of difficult situations, a few of us talk to ourselves.

None can resist the involuntary impulse of exclaiming one’s emotions at the sight of a ghastly vehicular accident on a road, no matter whether or not one hears us at those moments. One can scarcely deny that one bursts his anger out with harsh words slipping out of his lips when he happens to bite a grit of stone stuck between his jaws when dining in a hotel.

Last Friday, as I descended the stairs in our office after closing work, I was chatting with one of my office-mates.

Other colleagues too were following me down the steps behind, but I wasn’t aware of them.

Suddenly, one of them asked me, “Whom are you talking to?” 

“I was talking to Mr Joginder”, I replied. It was then I realised I was actually talking to myself as I came down those few steps because the colleague had already slipped into the toilet on the mezzanine. My face shrank with a tinge of shame as I realised my monologue, though it was for a short while.

Once on our return from the Bangalore City Railway Station, I stopped my scooter at the traffic signal which had turned red at Mekhri Circle (way back in 1993). My son sitting behind had quietly got down there, which I did not realise.

After the signal had turned green and I proceeded within a few seconds, I kept talking to myself all the 12 kms long journey back home thinking that my son was still on the pillion listening to me. It was only when my wife asked me after I got back home, “Where is Suresh?” that I understood the folly of my gapless soliloquy.

There are other instances when people talk to themselves under the pressure of circumstances. It is an indisputable fact that some of us are most of the times, while most of us are sometimes soliloquists, forced by circumstances.