True, some men and women are able to get in touch with any audience, with people previously unknown or only slightly familiar to them, or to enter into a conversation with a stranger quite easily and unconstrained just at very first minutes of a meeting even without a formal greeting such as “hello”.
As for myself, I might look at them with an admiring envy of their excellent communicative skills, honestly. For I had definite difficulties in my youth, sometimes, to start just an elementary conversation – even with an acquaintance, leave alone a stranger, due to certain features of my personality. However, just those initial seconds and minutes are the most important stages when to create required mood of a meeting, to understand intentions of the visitor and to show your attitude towards him, are not they?
Therefore, naturally, styles and forms of greetings have their precious meaning in any culture, whatever the mentality of its people. That is of course, if one takes the subject much wider, without limiting the discussion exclusively to the complicated manner of the Turkmen in the field of addressing and greeting.
Instead of an expected introduction, which is a common way to start an essay or short story, let the author begin a conversation with the esteemed readers by recalling the old times – my own school years.
I have studied in a secondary school in the former Soviet Union. To those not quite familiar with the practice of those years it has to be explained that, at that period, the most prestigious Soviet schools, throughout the entire territory of the giant country inhabited by various ethnic groups, has instruction in Russian language, and their teaching program was based on the Russian culture. It was so beginning from the elementary classes for almost all secondary schools of the USSR.
As an additional clarification, I should emphasize that all teachers in the school I graduated from had academic and other higher educator degrees which were totally unexpected for such a remote and provincial school. If I remember correctly after two or three decades that passed, our mathematics teacher came from the Novosibirsk Division of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union; the English language teacher was a graduate of the Moscow Institute of International Relations (where almost all Soviet diplomats studied); and our Russian language and literature teacher was nearly a nominee for a membership of the Soviet Writers’ Union. If I might be mistaken, it would be just exclusively out of my sincere and deepest respect to all of them and out of my gratitude for their lessons in life.