Conversation starter

How do you start a conversation with your spouse, or your family member, or your friend, or a colleague or a total stranger?

Back when I was in the UK, I remember how easy it was to start a conversation even with a total stranger. I remember chatting with elderly people at the bus stop waiting for the bus headed for the campus by just asking about the weather. Incredibly, in the UK, not only can you start a conversation by mentioning the weather, but the conversation about the weather can go on and on. Simply put, the weather is a topic for discussion in the UK.

What about us Malaysians? What gets us into a conversation? Weather would probably be a topic for a chat, especially with the unpredictable weather conditions of late. Politics would also probably be another topic. But I realised that there is another topic that is more popular than the weather and politics to start a conversation in Malaysia, especially in big cities such as Kuala Lumpur.

The topic is the traffic condition. People would talk about it when the traffic is bad. And people would talk about it enthusiastically when they got to work early because there is no heavy traffic!