How are you?

How are you? A question that has been asked by 100 people a 1000 times. Almost everywhere we go. Go to a friend, a relative, a teacher, an acquaintance, any professional…anybody and the first thing they ask you is—HOW ARE YOU? Sometimes I really do wonder if we know what we are asking and even if we do, do we really expect a honest, well thought response?
It is taken for granted that everything is ok... Most of the time we don’t even wait for a response. We just go ahead with the rest of the conversation, which would mainly have lots more of these standardized phrases that are there in ones vocabulary as some sort of icebreaker or rather an opening statement. The irony of it all is the fact that most of us know the answer is also going to be on the same lines- “great!”, “I’m fine”, “good” “well, going on!”. And the most hilarious part is the fact that we don’t even listen to it! i wonder if it is because most of the time we are so engrossed in thinking about all the things that has to be said next that we don’t even listen to what is actually being said now.
Like it happened to me a couple of weeks ago. A friend of mine meets me and and uses the famous three words- “How are you?”, I, not exactly in the pink of my health that time and so I told her that I wasn’t all that fine. She just looked at me and said I heard you get good coffee in that restaurant there, wanna go?
But does that mean that if it weren’t for the overused menu of words or phrases like “How are you?” “Howz life?”, “How is everything?” a person would not know what to say or how to start speaking to somebody? If we didnt have these standard cliched opening sttements... how would we start?