My friend, I didn't mean that !

...The world of opposites

Recently in many of my interactions, I am experiencing how language can be a big barrier in communicating what one wants to and how the understanding of something changes drastically depending on the existing mental categories. Let me try to give those real incidents.

Proposal: This institute is not for those who are looking for just a job at the end of the course. ( Assumed understanding: This is a place of learning and one would like to see students excel in computer science and grow into responsible individuals. Job is a natural consequence, but it should not be the ONLY target).

Conclusion Drawn: If you are interested in making a living after college, this is not the place for you.

When the students were suggested that they should sleep early, and not trouble themselves much, It was surprising to see that the student(s) actually concluded that sleeping late is not allowed in their campus! And they seem to feel the pressure of losing their freedom of sleeping late!

In another instance, some students ate the food of a canteen which is supposed to serve healthy food on campus. They did not like the food. It was not tasty. And everyone says that the food there is healthy food. And in a short period, guess what the conclusion was. “Healthy food can never be tasty”! I was surprised to see this conclusion.

Yet another surprise was when the discussion of “how much do we need?” was going on. I proposed that what all we need as of today in terms of food, clothing, shelter, the instruments (accessories) for making a non-compromising living can be listed down. And that usually this need remains like that with minor variations. The conclusion drawn implicitly was that one should not live a comfortable life, we need to cut down our requirements and that we can do with little money! :-) All this without even actually doing the exercise of listing down the things that one is looking for!! While the exercise actually was aimed at illustrating that the “things that we need” which we felt to be an infinite list is not really so long, its just that we have not attempted to collate all of them!

Pawan ji says “In languages we tend to make (false) categories and these are given to us as realities from early childhood. We get used to a binary world of opposites – day/night, sunrise/sunset, man/woman, girl/boy etc.etc. Though these are all different from each other we start taking them as opposites. The notion of opposites reduces the space for understanding things properly”

Proposal: You are encouraged to eat food within campus. (And we are striving to improve the food on campus)
Conclusion: Students are not allowed to eat outside campus.

May be in some other instances even I was making such conclusions! One way I think of avoiding or at least minimizing such interpretations, especially when the audience is new and skeptical about anything we speak is to speak out the assumptions too. Speaker need to probably take more care in communicating what was really meant. For example, the case of telling that the institute is more interested in you learning the courses and excelling in the field and it is not about just finishing the courses could be explained in more detail.

Apart from the way we are brought up in the world of opposites, one thing that pushes us towards concluding the opposites is the lack of Trust. When we are sure that the other is trying to tell something which he wants to be of good to me, we cannot easily concluded the opposites. It is the sense of feeling exploited or the feeling of being dominated that might trigger these negatives easily.And these conclusions only aggravate the situation.Not good for anyone. So lets be more careful in communication.