Incommunicado

There’s an old man whom I meet almost everyday now – he’s a parking attendant. He has a speech impediment that renders most of what he’s saying incoherent. He claims to know quite a few languages and from what I make out of his Malayalam, it is quite passable. I did try to make conversation with him a few times, but felt uncomfortable every time I asked him to repeat something. Sometimes I see him talking to himself. Maybe he is relaxed when he doesn’t have to explain, or maybe he doesn’t want a response when someone cannot understand him.

A few experiences made me compare his condition to my communication on Twitter. I have always fancied Twitter for the lifestream capability. That’s one of the reasons (the fear of losing the lifestream) that I’ve even started hosting my tweets in my own space. But, while I can do that on the blog, the conversations and some interesting people I come across make an effective bonus that keeps me hanging in there.

However, last week, something made me question my Twitter existence. On two consecutive days, I was ‘forced’ (yes, I do take responsibility for forcing myself too) to explain tweets which were my reactions to a couple of stuff that were being talked about on Twitter. The reactions were not pro or against anyone, and did not even touch upon the central issues, they were just interesting to me from a thoroughly different perspective. No, I am not going to detail them here, but suffice to say that while I was explaining, I felt like the old man, who found it so difficult to communicate something that perhaps (and most likely) in his head, doesn’t suffer from any lack of clarity at all. It frustrated me that, even keeping aside barriers like language and speech impediments, it has become impossible for us (I blame myself too, and am generalizing, so those above all this, please ignore) these days to take a statement or idea and not immediately judge it and catalog it safely into some stereotype we have made in our head (in both cases, I was considered either pro something or against something, when I didn’t have an opinion at all, because the issues themselves were of relatively lesser importance to me)

Sometimes, I see the old man in conversation with others, and he seems to be enjoying it. Maybe his companions know him enough to figure out what he’s trying to say, or maybe they’re just nice people who would like to see him happy and make him feel that there are people who understand him, in spite of his disability. If it’s the latter, I hope he never finds out.

until next time, communication channel surfing