How observant are we?

Last week I had the privilege to be an invitee to a Rajasthani theme party hosted by a close friend. The hosts hail from the picturesque Rajasthan state. Since the theme was ‘Rajasthan’ the guests came dressed up in colorful Rajasthani attire. Needless to mention the cuisine was purely Rajasthani with dishes like gatte, dal bati choorma, ghevar etc. Like a typical Rajathani woman, Lata played the perfect host and had put in lot of effort to prepare the mouth watering Rajasthani dishes.
The theme party would have remained incomplete without testing the awareness quotient of the guests on Rajasthan. Prepared by Pradeep, it was a simple but very creative quiz with questions about forts, palaces, deserts and celebrities of Rajasthan but most of us failed miserably.
“I have heard about this fort/place but I am not very sure about it” was the most common response to all the questions. Though we had heard/read about these places many times but we were still not very confident. Many of us did not even know the city of their( host) origin.
Information is all around us but do we really grasp even half of it?
Having a theme party about a place is an excellent way to generate interst in that place as it is a human tendency to find out the answers to unanswered questions and to learn more about it.
The moot question is –
Do we really pay attention to people even our close friends when they talk about themselves? In the past 6 years I have spoken /met Lata umpteenth times but are we really paying attention to things around us? Is it that we are unconcerned about others even the people close to us or we have the ‘not my business’ attitude?
Perhaps the same attitude is carried in others things. If we think we are directly or indirectly benefitting from this( a conversation/ lecture, information, piece of knowledge), we pay attention or else not. I did not even know that Lata’s and my son who are the best of friends have the same birth place. Are we becoming indifferent to things around us and absorb only what is benefitting us directly?
These days we believe in superficial relationships. This is the world of ‘Let me mind my own business and you mind yours’. Though we may not be practicing this delibrately but over a period of time, it becomes a habit with us.