Communication--A Circumspection

By WG CDR NB Nair

Communication forms important ingredient for the very existence of living things. It takes place automatically, without the consent of anybody. The history of evolution and development of communication is the same as that of human civilization. The advent and existence of both of these have been more accidental than designed by anyone; they have been developed through gradual natural organic processes slowly and steadily over many a millennium. Thus they are self-created and developed, and it is communication that did design, foster, transform, culture and perpetuate societies as a catalyst would do. Communication can be oral as well as written. Both of them form two arms of communication.
His fairly long experience as a Senior Officer of the Indian Air Force has encouraged him to muse about communicative system being followed in the Military Organizations. The two topics, A Canine Perspective and A Speaking Bed, appearing in Part IV of the book, with their thought-provoking potential, would instil implosion of interest in the minds of his enlightened readers. They are on autobiographical mode. He has effected a thorough revision of his own book. He has added some new dimensions related to communication, viz, language and pronunciation. His critical vision is very well apparent in his writings. He is quite humorous as well as satirical at times. As a whole, the book can very well be thought of as a wholesome mini-compendium of information on Communication. The book shall surely be of great help to one-and-all, especially to fresher students of Management.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
• Release date: Sep 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781482857085

WG CDR NB Nair

Wing Commander NB Nair, after retirement as a senior officer from the Indian Air Force, has been working as a Management Consultant. He is an astute and craving pedagogue. He has been associated with Indira Gandhi National Open University in the capacity of an Academic Counsellor in Management Studies. He was a Visiting Faculty in Management in Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. He has been associated with NGOs engaged in teaching English language to economically and socially backward children. He has been teaching the subject of Communication in a premier private institution. He has to his credit a number of publications. Even at the ripe age of seventy-five he is pursuing his writing endeavours. He deserves full recognition.

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Copyright © 2015 by WG CDR NB NAIR (RETD).

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-4828-5707-8

                eBook          978-1-4828-5708-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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CONTENTS

PART — I

Communication – A Circumspection

Communication in Business Organizations

Soliloquy — A Sort of Communication

Silence — A Medium of Comminication

Communication System in Military Context

PART — II

Telepathy, Intuition & Instincts Vis-A-Vis Communication

Role of Humour in Communication

Indulgence in Counselling

Braggartism

Sarcasm, Derision, Insultation

PART — III

Communication Vis-A-Vis Other Members of Fauna

Communication Vis-À-Vis Flora

PART — IV

A Speaking Bed

A Canine Perspective

PART — V

The Languages and Their Utility

Dedicat

ed to

The everlasting memory of

My beloved parents.

FOREWORD TO THE FIRST EDITION

Communication is integral to bonding in to-day’s fast-paced world more than ever. Its importance needs no stressing. Communicative interactions exist between and among members of the fauna and flora, and between and among the various elements of the Great Nature. It exists there between and among the Sun, Planets and their Moons of our Solar System. We have every right to imagine and conceive that there could be communicative link-up between and among the millions of Solar Systems of the Universe. Believe it or not, some chosen souls among us have access to a ‘hotline’ system of communication directly with God Almighty -- we call it ‘Communion’. In a nutshell, we can say that Communication is all-pervasive and ever relevant.

Man is a social animal. Most of the members of the fauna too exist in societies. A society stands for group activities. A group may be homogeneous or heterogeneous. Exchange of thoughts – communication - is the thread that binds individual members together in a society and hence it forms the quintessential part of any social living. It is very vital for the very sustenance of any society. In fact a definition of the word, ‘society’ will connote and include communication. Man is a thinking animal. His thoughts encompass all aspects of the art of his living. Thoughts are communicated and disseminated for the use of all the members of his society.

I feel greatly privileged and proud and extremely happy to write a few words in the form of a Foreword to this book entitled, Communication -- A Circumspection, written by my good old friend, Wg Cdr NB Nair. I have read his previous work, Random Reflections, and have been greatly impressed by the way he has expressed flippantly and frankly his views on many of the human traits prominently exhibited by humans themselves while at their intra-social interactions. In the present book, he has briefly communicated, in particular to the ab initio students of Management, the various aspects of the most quintessential aspect of societal living - communicating. Inclusion as well as essaying of topics like, Soliloquy, Silence, Braggartism and Telepathy in the realm of communication, is quite interesting and as such the most striking features of this work. His fairly long experience as a Senior Officer of the Indian Air Force has encouraged him to muse about communicative system being followed in the Military Organizations. I must say that the last two topics, A Canine Perspective and A Speaking Bed, appearing in Part IV of the book, with their thought-provoking potential, would instil implosion of interest in the minds of his enlightened readers. As a whole, the book can very well be thought of as a wholesome mini-compendium of information on Communication. I am sure that the book shall be of great help to one-and-all, especially to fresher-students of Management. I sincerely wish the book and its author everything the best.

Dr Gopakumar G Nair

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This is a revised version of my earlier book, COMMUNICATION – A CIRCUMSPECTION published in 2011. I have effected some logical re-structuring of the contents. I have also added some new dimensions related to the subject. I have tried to make the subject more sumptuous and wholesome and that is what this revised version is going to offer.

I am indebted to all beings of this beautiful globe, members of fauna and even flora, who have been my best teachers. Whatever bit of empirical knowledge that I could gather has mainly come about as a by-product of my childlike keen observations on their individualistic as well as collective behaviour at various stages and situations, and so also my interactions with them. The output of these observations and interactions has then been brought to micro-focus and analysed, to the extent of my capability, with proportionate tinge of real and virtual imaginative projections on them.

I hereby express my special gratitude to Dr Gopakumar G Nair for writing Foreword to this book. Dr Nair has had over forty years of experience in the industrial world where he has held positions of Director, Chairman & Managing Director of a medium range Pharmaceutical Enterprise in Mumbai. He was formerly President of Indian Drugs & Pharmaceutical Association. He is a member of Editorial Boards of several publications. He is a well-known educationist, philanthropist and a social activist. He is highly active with activities of GNAs (Gopakumar G Nair Associates), a premier intellectual property consultancy and legal advisory establishment, founded by him.

My thanks are due to my son Siddharth who took pains to go through the entire manuscript and offered valuable suggestions. His collection of poems is almost ready for publication.

It will be blasphemous if I do not express my gratitude to all those respected and devoted English teachers, who taught me various aspects of English language and literature. I hold all of them in my esteemed memory especially late Prof. C.A. Sheppard.

Lastly, but not the least, I would thank M/S Partridge India Publishers for the interest evinced in publishing this book. But for the positive help from them this Revised Edition of my book would not have seen the light of the day.

Wg Cdr NB Nair (Retd)

MUMBAI

INTRODUCTION

It may not be an expression of sheer imagination when we say that there exists a subtle communication system existing between a child in the womb and its potential mother. It is known fact that the mother unconsciously conveys her feelings of happiness and unhappiness, fear and anxieties experienced by her during pregnancy, to the foetus growing within her through the nervous net-work, blood, genes, food supplies and even breath, That is why there is a platitude that the expectant mothers should be kept happy and cheerful always in order to ensure that the children born would be mentally and physically healthy.

Right from birth, all organisms start communicating. A new born human baby cries as soon as it comes out of the womb. It seems it a paradox when we say, ‘When the new-born infant cries, the elders around laugh’, or on the contrary, ‘A dying person laughs while the living people around him cry.’ The cry of an infant is not out of agony but it symbolizes an effort on the part of it to adjust itself to the new environment. It feels like ‘a fish out of water’. The infant has not been in a hurry ‘to come out’ but as was given ‘marching-out orders’ to vacate the area for better reasons; it has just simply obeyed the orders. A mother’s womb is the best resting place in the world, cozy, controlled conditions of pressure and temperature, with excellent arrangements for food, care-free living conditions, and above all, the presence of a ‘swimming pool’ of soft trough bed.

During the time when it was in the womb, its wants were not expressed explicitly; the needed things were being given to it without being asked for; there was only an implied expression of wants. The infant cries. This is probably its first piece of (expressed) communication. It conveys to Nature that it needs oxygen to breathe and the Nature provides it. This initial crying helps develop its lungs; it is a breathing exercise too. The infant again cries expressing its need for food and its understanding mother meets its requirements – Milk is given only to a crying child. In each of these cases a two-way communication is complete even without a word being uttered. This system of communication continues between the infant and the mother until the former develops a medium, efficient enough to meet its requirements by its own efforts independently for its survival. It learns a language instinctively from its mother. It is the ‘mother tongue’ as some of us call it. The mother trains and conditions the child in her own style.

The striking difference between a human being and other members of the fauna is that the former is having a well-developed mind and brain, capable of thinking about everything around him. He even thinks about himself too. His thoughts, howsoever lofty, will have no utility in the context of social living if he chooses to keep them preserved in his mind alone. When he leaves the world on cessation of his earthly innings, these thoughts would also be buried in his coffin along with him. Evil that men doth liveth after them, good is oft interned in their graves. On the other hand, if he leaves them (good thingt) behind expressed, it would be of great help in terms of enhancing the quality of life of others, still left behind by him, to live in the world. So he has to communicate and disseminate his thoughts. This is how we can conceive of continuity of life. ‘Life’ carries on in the same way as a baton appropriated for athletic ‘relay race’, getting succeeded from the hand of the first participant to that of the second and the successive participants of the group. And the relay race carries on. The baton does not disappear unlike the participants. People come and go but their thoughts are forever. These thoughts and actions of theirs become traditions for the successive generations and these traditions subsequently are sunk into culture and civilization. It is a slow and gradual organic transformation. The origin of this kind of process is prehistoric. Group activities are the essence of societal living. In this it is imperative that information and knowledge acquired by one- and-all are shared among all the members of the society through interactional transactions and webs of communication. But for this, our societies would not have flourished and attained advancement as we witness to-day. Communication plays its quintessential role.

The history of evolution and development of communication is the same as that of human civilization. The advent and existence of both of these have been more accidental than designed by anyone; they have been developed through gradual natural organic processes slowly and steadily over many a millennium. Thus they are self-created and developed, and it is communication that did design, foster, transform, culture and perpetuate societies, as a catalyst would do.

I have now designed the book in five parts.

Part I deals with human communication in general – a circumspection. In this Part, besides general aspects of communication, I have briefly discussed some aspects of business communication. I have also analysed briefly topics of ‘Soliloquy’ and ‘Silence’. Both of them represent some element or semblance of communication. Some special features that we observe in the typical system of communication being in vogue in armed forces are high-lighted briefly in the Essay entitled ‘Communication in Military Context’.

Contained in Part II, are essays on ‘Telepathic Communication’, ‘Role of Humour in Communication’ and ‘Counselling, ‘Braggartism’ and ‘Sarcasm, Derision and Insultation’ are special or peculiar types of communication taking place amongst human beings.

Contained in Part III, are Communication vis-à-vis other members of the fauna and that with respect to flora.

Contained in Part IV, are two narrations; the first, dealing with the saga of existence of a personified inanimate object, bed, in ‘A Speaking Bed’ and the second, a candid self- analytical account of the life of a pet-dog in ‘A Canine Perspective’. Both of these narrations are on autobiographical mode.

Contained in Part V, are some general points in brief on languages and their pronunciation.

PART — I

COMMUNICATION – A CIRCUMSPECTION

In the ancient times our ancestors were jungle-dwellers like all other members of the fauna kingdom. Humans were not physically as strong as many other animals in the jungle. There were among others many small and weak animals too. Humans individually had to face many problems which even threatened their survival. Naturally they had developed survival instincts. It was this survival instinct that had brought them together. Initially, they had felt the need to protect their young ones from aggressive strong wild animals. Living together in groups as families was the solution. They had instinctively understood that union was strength. Gradually they started grouping of families. The humans based on commonality of their traits and tastes, formed initially mini-groups. Thereafter gradually many such mini-groups formed-up major ones called associations or societies and they then lived in them, within their ‘four walls’ harmoniously and happily. These were organic entities or establishments which would grow or decay, depending on dynamic conditions in and around them. They too had their laws and bye-laws governing the various aspects of their existence, sustenance and survival. The configuration as well as the internal structure of these associations or societies remained intact so long as these rules were not circumvented or violated. These were all part of grand natural organic evolution gradually taking place in the living world over millions of years.

Similarly all other members of the fauna too started living together as groups or some sort of societies. None can say who imitated whom—humans or other animals. It is true of the present times too. The role of the societies even in the present time has not changed even a bit, despite passage of time. Societies are for sharing happiness and sorrow of individual members, notwithstanding other benefits. None is so much bothered about sharing happiness