Everyplace has its prosaic aspects. Such topics have their legitimate uses, for example to start a conversation when one wants to but has no other traction; which also implies that the prosaic is what one can use to mindlessly kill a conversation when one is not interested at all.
Ambiguity, and the commonplace, might well be keys to politeness and civility (if not indispensable to bear the discontententment of civilizations).
Canada has the topic of weather well exercised (except maybe for Vancouver where the weather changes so much less); no less than 2 24h weather channels besides the regular announcements, that people actually watch! (this should be good news for those interested in making conversation; though other challenges await the canadian chatter). It does make some sense as Canadian weather can change quickly.

In Hyderabad, a much chattier place than Toronto, one of several topics is traffic. This it shares with most large cities and more so with non-western ones. Yes torontonians! you are entitled to complain too, but only as a whim; yes romans! you are more justified, but really it's your style that saves you. In Hyderabad traffic actually must kill routinely: by physical impact, by air poisoning, by cardiac arrest, by casual dismemberment...
To the newcomer it really looks like life is very cheap here. And it may well be in India; but that's another topic I'm definitely forced to look at.
Lanes, road directions (they go routinely against traffic), lights, hand signs and prayer, are often disregarded. I can't really describe it succintly, it's really chaos.
The real surprise is that no one seems angry or even discombobulated. Rome has beautiful exchanges of possibly complex insults. Here people barely blink.
Perhaps they can't afford to blink!
Many times I just don't know how come big trucks and my autorickshaw avoided each other: I mean this entirely literally: one must train one's eye like for sports to start catching the moments of lifechanging decisions. Like say for soccer or hockey when the ball/puck moves you've already missed the moment. When you see the charging motorbike it's too late to make decisions. Yet drivers are Musashis with large metal hulks. Most of my fatal errors, oops I mean all of them--have been gracefully tolerated.
I'm a trained Montreal and Paris jaywalker, but this traffic management approach implies there is a traffic! Here there are only flows: like coloured paints or rivers mixing up with no definite borders ... and such natural processes are mathematically chaotic: just as you can't go back and separate colours or rivers once they are mixed, you can never go back in Hyderabadi traffic: only forward in a new direction.
In fact I'd revise jaywalking theory, by saying you can't jaywalk in Hyderabad: you have only two questions to ask yourself: are you part of the flow or part of the pavement? and are you alive? There is no grey area.
And there is no driving in such traffic either: you must develop your presence as an actor uses a mask or costume; your klaxon, wheels, movements, lights, hands and shouts all must all be extensions of your body via the metal costume you travel in. Either you capture the attention of the "spectactors" or you're a liability to all.
Of course driving here can become a habit. Or you hire a driver which is very common. Here one does not pass silly tests, one is naturally selected or not.
Oh but way before one dreams of entering this circus, one realizes it can be fun: traffic as a spectator sport.
Just to wrap this thought, yes traffic is terrible, mostly because it's customary for a trip to take as long in a car as by foot: hours. Spent in terrible pollution of course. I really feel midday trips shave off hours of my life. People only a few kilometers away behave as if they live in different cities. That aspect of the city can become a totally serious reason to hesitate living here. I mean the traffic hours add up to the noise, city complexity, pollution, danger, really bad road conditions, and so on.
And yet... people don't get angry! Again maybe you can't aford that second of loss of control. However that "gentleness", and the quotes should be in quotes too, is definitely one aspect of the communicative toolset that's particular to some of India at least. Like the head bobbing that initially seems to mean yeas, no, maybe, sure, please, go to hell, all in one graceful gesture. In romania we had the "turkish yes" (well it's greek too) which I think is part of the indian bob. But really the head circles are what facial expressions are to italians: here the face is "gently" smiling but the head (and eyes of course) is litterally writing in the air. Or not smiling, there is actuall I think no compulsion to smile; just a mask. Perhaps the forced smile is much more western than the civilized non-quite-smile-but-really-looking-so that's commonly perceived by westerners in "asia". And some don't do smiling at all. Which is quite striking and I think reveal that what westerners call the "fake smile" is indeed not fake nor a smile, but more a canvas: full of potential but not fake.

Maybe because non-western cites can be so tough to navigate asian expats have started the "hash runs"; groups of people running together in nice settings towards a party after: "drinkers with a running problem" as their saying goes, certainly seems so in the 40C heat. It's a global "open source" post-colonial kind of event; intro: http://half-mind.com/Hashing/who.htm#2