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The first cry of the infant is the primal, purest form of communication. Without uttering a word, the infant communicates to the world his raw and myriad feelings of fear, confusion, and wonder of a starkly different environment he is being thrown into, which is not of his choice. Yet, without a word, we understand fully well what the infant is trying to tell us, and there is no mistaking of our perception because he delivers the message unfiltered with the niceties of culture and language.
Language as it is, never captures what the person really thinks and feels. Language is both liberating and limiting. The words we speak and write have specific connotations which society have prescribed as it evolves. And thus, our expression of feelings and ideas are imprisoned in the limitation of how society understands, by conventions, the word we use. We use the word “happy” so many times to express our state of elation or bliss or euphoria. But the word can never sum up our experiences of the state of being happy considering that our experiences of happiness vary in depth and degree. Our experience of happiness is lost in translation when it is mediated into words for others to understand. Somehow, we will never express well our peculiar happiness because the society only gives the general idea of what the word means. That is why poetry still stands out as the most enriching form of communication because the reader or listener, as the case may be, is not drawn only to the words, printed or said, but to the similes, metaphors, hyperboles, which convey the whole range of emotions and ideas by being drawn to the experience the poet wants to convey.
The tragedy is that the infant, as he grows older and becomes versed in the language of his society, also learns to use words, not to convey his ideas and perceptions and feelings, but precisely to hide them. In our encounter with our loved ones, how often we ask questions like, “How are you?”, and very often we receive a reply, “ I am okay.” The question needs simple and direct reply. But how often did we reply, “ Am okay”, yet deep inside we are agonizing, but if only not to cause worry and alarm to our children, and parents, our friends, to people closest to us, we say ,” I am okay.” How can a person be okay when he is bleeding inside?
How many have been misled by the most famous phrase, “ I love you”, when actually, the underlying feeling that is hidden in the phrase is that of lust and passion, of sex and nothing more. How can we say the phrase and yet mean the exact opposite, the anti-thesis of love, the selfishness of pure passion and lust?
The infant as he grows older, and is now equipped with the tool of words and language has learned to use language merely as a tool ; that words can be used not necessarily to express one’s feelings and ideas but to cloak them. As students, we are formally taught in school the use of precise word to convey the idea. But the world we are living is one vast laboratory of what can be called as the school of mal-communication.
There are many times that we miss to convey our feelings and ideas not because we want to misinform but due to our ineptness with the language. When there is miscommunication, the other is misled with what one really wants to convey. But this breakdown of communication is never intentional. When we say something to precisely mislead the other, that is mal-communication, not miscommunication.
To re-iterate, our society is the vast school of the art of mal-communicating. In an effort to be politically correct, we have coined words which fail to express the truth. A child who is suffering from some form of mental disorder or deficiency, we call him as “special child”, as if to be autistic, and the like is in truth special. Since when a deficiency have become special? Whichever and however you look at it, there is nothing special about a deficiency. We do not anymore call a handicap person as such, we now call him “ Physically-challenged” . But is it not that the word handicap the true state of being for this person, and being such, we ought to shower him with compassion and understanding? Why not call a spade a spade? Why not cease to say “okay”, when it is not really?
The modern world has exposed us to e-communication. You have the cable tv, internet, cellphones, laptops and print and broadcast media. Everyday, we are bombarded with the news and information. But be wary, there are double-speaks, words that are not said to convey but to mislead and to misdirect. Bill Clinton’s double-speaks were classic. To parry accusations of Lewinsky affair, he said,” I admit to have sexual impropriety with that woman.” He was denying the allegation by admitting some. President Arroyo, when asked about a recorded conversation with an election official the topic of which was obviously to rig the presidential election, instead of admitting the wrong, merely said, “ I admit to a lapse of judgement,” in the Clintonian tradition. What judgement did she refer to? This is misdirecting the listener or reader.
In a world of competing ideas, the threat is not the emergence of radical ideas in the democratic space, but the molding of ideas by sheer propaganda. Slogans are told, repeated, and for every repetition, the slogans become bigger and more grand, Goebbels-style, the grand propagandist of the Fuhrer. Propagandists are the worst proponents of mal-communication. They use words and symbols not to communicate but to mislead, not to expose the truth but to hide. From them, we witness the emergence of people who blindly follow slogans to their graves.
In the information age, there is a compelling need to communicate, to inform, to expose the true feelings and ideas. In a word, there is a need to revisit to the primal cry of the infant, the purest form of communication.
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