How are you

Can we communicate better?

"Hello..." She said.

"Hello"

"How are you..."

He begins thinking.. How am I? Not a great time this..hardly any sleep for the last 2 days..walking around like a zombie with nothing but the deadlines in my head...my wallet is empty again, so is the fuel tank...the food was atrocious as usual.... havent got time to shave off this itchy growth off my face..there is a new virus on my..."

"How are you?"

Still thinking...and then in general i havent been doing so good have I? final year of college and no job offers yet...have lost so much weight....The project is going nowhere and i am hardly doing well with you sweetheart..."

"HOW ARE YOU?"

"yeah...um..i am fine..how are you..."

So often do we say things that make us wonder afterward what made us say them. It is just one of those things that we do because we are expected to, because not doing them would be odd, because of the requirement of confirmity and because of imposed structure. This one in particular makes for a very interesting analysis...lets see...

language and its purpose. Like all forms of human activity, verbal communication started out as a basic need of more efficient survival. To be able to live and gather food while synergizing strenghts, those anthropoids needed a sophisticated communication medium beyond the basic set thats common to all animals. With time, this medium was a source of pleasure in itself, it became an art form, literature came into existence. Similarly sounds grew into music, sense of colour grew into painting, 'creating things' with your hands evolved into various forms of craft.

The purpose of language is, from this perspective, two fold.... Transmission of objective information: facts...lets call this the dialectical side; and a means of subjective expression....lets say the rhetorical purpose. Sounds familiar?

Most of our normal conversations consist of both kinds of expressions. Only we seldom create new rhetorical expressions while speaking and use what is a very rich set of socially acceptable rhetorical expressions (s.a.r.e s) passed down onto us. Why exactly is it odd when we dont use rhetoric? Remember the basic pupose.. add beauty to verbal communication. The s.a.r.es have basically evolved along, and thus are in line with all other social norms, anything out of which appears odd. Consider for a moment the guy pictured above trying to tell the girl the truth. Also think about the way the character of Nash approaches the girl in the bar in 'A Beautiful Mind'. Thats pure objective communication for you!

Can we cut away from this imposed structure, and more important, do we want to? The answer is a YES. This imposed structure has become too burdensome, introducing too many inefficiencies in the way we all communicate. Things on your mind but not on your tongue lead to so many misunderstandings...leading to lies, jealousy, hate..much of the problems of this world.

Picture a world where each one can read everyone else's mind without going through words...or equivalently a fully transparent system of communication.What happens to literature then? Very intersting..and unimaginable...At the other extreme, imagine a world which has nothing but weirdos talking in terms of riddles which require infinite levels of shared mutual knowledge.No one able to get anything through to anyone else and thus also perfectly isolated. Individuals staying individual.

Perfection..... is the right balance...