HSS-1 | Assignment
P Sai Abhishek
Humans are social animals and one of the things that enables us to evolve is communication.
A very vital part of this communication is “Negotiation” which is a part and parcel of our
daily lives. We negotiate in all kinds of scenarios, be it the auto driver who won’t settle for a
fare below Rs100 or our loving parents who want us to pursue a lucrative career pathway, we
even negotiate with ourselves and that’s how we find reason to achieve and realise our goals.
The most thought about negotiations are with the people that are the closest to us. We spend
so much of our time in the presence of our near and dear ones that sometimes situations arise
where negotiations are the only thing method that will lead to a solution. This was clearly
heightened in the Covid-19 lockdown where everyone had to spend months together.
One such instance occurred roughly in the month of September. Ali and Shyaam have been
my closest friends since the 9th grade. We all live in the same society and spend most of our
time together by playing sports, watching movies and many more fun things. The seniors in
my society fondly call us the “Trio”, that’s how closely knit we are. In the month of
September, the lockdown was being removed and slowly things were getting back to
normalcy and restaurants in my city- Mumbai were starting to open up. We as teenagers were
very excited to again go back to those wonderful memories of dining outside and enjoying
our food. But the problem here was Ali is a non-vegetarian and spending months in the
lockdown he wasn’t able to get access to good non-vegetarian food. I on the other hand am a
pure vegetarian. Shyaam is not a big foodie and doesn’t really care about the food he eats.
Both, Ali and I were negotiating with each other for hours on the phone and we were also
trying to sway Shyaam’s allegiance to our respective sides. Ali wanted to eat in a Nonvegetarian friendly restaurant and I on the other hand wanted to eat in a vegetarian friendly
restaurant. Both of these restaurants are near our society and can easily be reached.
The negotiation strategy I used here was the ‘collaborative one’. Since, both of us are good
friends we were trying to convince the other about the merits of our respective restaurant
choices. I kept telling him how vegetarian food is light on the pocket and he was telling me
that he hadn’t good non-vegetarian food for months. This ongoing argument enabled us to
consider newer alternatives and expand our options. This way the discussion slowly shifted
from our respective restaurant choices to newer pastures where we were discussing about
newer restaurants. Finally, we decided to visit a restaurant which is a bit far away from where
we live but it is equally famous for its Paneer dishes as well as it’s Chicken delicacies. The
price of the final bill was not a pleasant sight though, but all the three of us had a wonderful
time and shared so many memories.
At that time, I didn’t know about the different types of negotiations but now that I look back,
the ‘collaborative approach’ was the most ideal one as it didn’t salvage the relationship of
ours and we still got to eat tasty food.
PS: When I was leaving for campus Ali and Shyaam made a plan and took me to that
Vegetarian friendly restaurant that I was hell bent on going initially. That made my day. A
simple conversation, a well thought negotiation and a decisive decision was all it took that
enabled us to prioritise our relationships over individual wants.