It was almost midnight. We were sitting in the bar lounge of the Hotel Mercure in Den Hague with glasses of assorted drinks – hot chocolate and cognac in front of me; beers for the two Dutch women and a whisky soda for the Dutchman. One of the Dutch women was my publisher and the other two were a journalist team. All around us voices rose and fell; smoke curled into the air in thin wisps and glasses clinked. Words, like signature notes, disentangled themselves from the hum of the conversation and rose above the din…at our table, the conversation veered towards action movies. Earlier in the evening, I had confessed to my great fascination for action films. Of the worlds of Steven Seagal and Van Damme; of the poetry of movies like Die Hard and The Edge; of the orderliness of emotion one encountered in that genre of cinema.

At some point, we discovered — all the three women present there — that we did share a common fondness for hard knocks, blood and gore. And so we arrived at that ultimate blood and gore film Kill Bill. As we dissected macabre scene by macabre scene, the voice of the lone man at our table rang out, “Girls, Girls….” It was a voice full of surprised shock. “You are frightening to listen to,” he said. “What are nice girls like you doing discussing such nasty things?” We laughed. We had gone a little overboard. But later, I was to ponder over this. So what are women expected to talk about?

On a visit to Bogota Colombia, my calendar of social engagements included a dinner with an ex Minister of Foreign Trade. Until then I had never met a real politician before and on a social basis. What was I going to chitchat about? And that too with someone whose realm was totally removed from mine? We freewheeled for a while. BPOs and the call centre phenomena is always a great starting point. She came up with a nugget about China’s AIDS rehabilitation programme being just a percentage of the budget allocated to build public toilets in Beijing. We moved to wine and Wi-Fi.And then we talked about that strange episode in the cable car as we rode up to the restaurant. A young couple suddenly announced their engagement to all and sundry.

A wicked giggle escaped me. The lady politician’s eyes and mine met. I knew what she was thinking. I was thinking the same: that the girl was in such a hurry to announce her engagement just so the boy wouldn’t change his mind the next day…. In a few minutes though we were discussing housemaids, drivers, husbands and in laws…and for the rest of the evening stayed there. Women, I told myself have a way of arriving at the four cornerstones of family life no matter who they are, high-powered politician or writer and somehow these are the stories that have greater entertaining power than anything else....