What i heard....

Not that I am particularly proud to admit this, nor does this reflect highly upon the quality or the quantity of my social endeavors, a significant percentage of the my daily 24 hours used to dissipate in the form of bits and bytes, and recently having acquired (by way of actually puncturing that financial envelop, I live in), a notebook, that percentage is almost all set to hit the one hundred mark. Anyway, some where in this entire cycle of existence, I was introduced to a screen saver that apart from its brilliant visual content – was thoroughly complemented by some very meaningful and fitting lines. And one such was – “It’s not what you look, it’s what you see”.

Apart from the fact that the statement in itself was very simple and appealing, what lead me to this entry on this blog was – “how many such explanations we encounter in our daily lives and how many we tend to ignore. The beauty of language is that (I am sure my linguistic friend will have a field day skinning me on this), it provides a medium that we are free to extrapolate, and mutilate to suit our requirement and convenience. However, what is equally brilliant (in it’s variety) is the width of the spectrum of human interpretation of what may seem to be identical statements.

Sure it leads to variety and yes variety may seem to be the spice of life and all that, however sometimes it’s this unique sense of interpretation that keeps us on our toes – while interacting with others and chasing that elusive truth, that illusive interpretation which ringing so true cuts across all lines, connecting one interpretation/ one viewer to another…maybe that sense of “balance” if you will.

To most of us, similarity between hear and listen might be apparent (given the fact that the required proximity to English, for such a comprehension is not particularly close). However, when someone says “You might hear all day – what matters is only what you heard”, it’s then that our own skills kick in. It’s then we realize that the additional dimension to that seemingly linear statement is where the actual matter of the statement resides.

The reason why all this seems significant to me is that it gives me relief to realize that I am not completely out of the comprehension loop. The comfort of this knowledge allows me to get a better understanding of all the sources of noise that may exist while I communicate with someone else and they don’t agree with what I hope they would hear.

Something towards this cropped up recently, during my conversation with a friend of mine (who is visually and intellectually superior than I am), and I suspect that he might have mistook my genuine attempts to express my “surprise” as my condescension and THAT matters to me (more about what happened – some other time).

I guess, all I am trying to say is that the beauty of a language is not defined by the preset linguistic acreage, it’s the individual perceptive extension of the same, that allows us to uniquely translate out impressions. To put it in another way, I have written this small passage, but what will matter is what one reads in it.

Dec. 3, 2004