Marcel Marceau at the Anganwadi Daycare Center

I went to the anganwadi alone on Thursday. That meant my communication with the teachers would be limited to my elementary Tamil. It is a double anganwadi which means there are two teachers. These teachers are incredible. I couldn’t do what they do. They are my heroes.

As I approached the door, I heard unusual disruption. There was an inordinate amount of crying and screaming. It made me think of the song, “Mama Said There’d be Days Like This, My Mama Said.” So I knew I needed to pull a rabbit out of the hat. I entered singing the time-honoured song, “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”  I wish I could sing it as well as this Indian lady. We kept singing it until most of the angry feelings had left.

Then I did what I haven’t done for many years: mime. When my husband and I were living in Paris, we got to see Marcel Marceau perform. He did David and Goliath, the Mask–which I modified for training exercises, and Adam and Eve. He was so incredibly inspiring. My husband and I actually dating while doing street theatre and mime. We used Marceau’s mime, “Adam and Eve.” (I wish I was as talented as this lady.) I can still do a pretty good snake with my arm. But one mime really struck me that he did–the box mime–it’s a mime where the victim finds himself caught in an invisible box. He bangs his fists furiously, trying to get out.

My husband and I did mime in various countries in Europe. In fact, I got my job working for Air France as a Concorde ground agent doing mime during the interview. In France, when we would put the white face on and start performing, hauty-looking people would suddenly change into impressionable children. You don’t know the French until you perform mime on the streets of Paris in front of the Sacre-Coeur. On the other hand, when we did mime at Colchester Castle Park, it went over like a lead balloon, and we became very self-conscious.  I think it may have had something to do with our next-door neighbour recognizing us and just saying, “Oh, hello.” and kept on walking.

In Italy, everyone already does mime when they talk, so it is one of the best places to do mime. One of the most rewarding places was in Helsinki, Finland. Finnish people the opposite of Italians–they aren’t what you’d call demonstrative. But when we did mime, crowds would come and we felt they were totally withus. In India, we don’t need make-up. We have white faces.

So years and continents later, here I was in a government pre-school with 40 unhappy kids and two tired teachers. So I started doing the mime. It is safe to say that these kids probably have never seen mime. It is sort of an abstract art. You have to concentrate to get it. I was taking a chance. The Twinkle warm-up was good, but would I lose my audience by trying something too high-brow.

These kids got it! They laughted at all the right places. Finally I motioned to one bright little girl to turn the “knob” on the other side of my “door.” She set me free!

Yes, these kids are always setting me free from the banalities of adulthood.  With them, you fly faster and higher than with the Concorde.

P.S.  I got to meet Marcel Marceau.  He was a passenger on the Concorde.  I must admit, I had fun giving him his boarding pass in a Marcel Marceau fashion.  He was very kind about my performance but did not insist I quit my day job.

The Anatomy of Chaos in Grey’s Anatomy

I watched the latest episode of Grey’s Anatomy. In one of my life times, I was a respiratory therapist and knew what it was to walk around with a beeper and be summoned for Code Blue’s. From all over the hospital we would come running to the room where a nurse had noticed that a patient was in respiratory or cardiac distress. No matter how we felt about each other, we all had to move in concert. I would get the ambubag. The intern or resident would be ready to intubate. A nurse had the electric paddles to bring the heart back. We were all ready to take orders.

This episode of Grey’s Anatomy was an accurate anatomy of a disaster due to a lack of team spirit. No one was looking to cover the other. There was no trust. Personal rivalries were still cooking in the forefront of everyone’s mind. A young mother died in the process.

On the other hand, the firefighters who came in to see one of their own who was burned had a camaraderie that demonstrated a working unit of professionals.

At the end, it was shown that it wasn’t even the dysfunctional team’s fault. It was the fault of the managing surgeon. He had not fostered teamwork. Although he had highly gifted employees, he did not encourage them work together. He felt as thought he killed this woman.

When will managers learn to foster team spirit at work? Why does fear allowed to reign at the work place. Why do team members turn on each other as the enemy and work against each other? Logic would tell you that you get more accomplished working together. No one has all the gifts and treasured skill-sets. No one is 100 percent on their game every day. There is so much to learn from one another.

It is up to the manager to deal with egos. But first, he will have to deal with his own. He will have to face his own fears and stop hiding his weaknesses. The truth will not only set you free, it will make you stronger and more powerful. You just need some character. If not, there will always be a plethora of unnecessary suffering.

Ten Signs that Showed Columbus He Wasn’t in India

Over 500 years ago, if Christopher Columbus had observed these signs, he would have known he wasn’t in India.

1. There was no sign of the British Raj. There were no pink men going around in tin hats speaking bad Hindi.

2. He saw women. The women of India would have been in purdah. The women he saw were wearing something like today’s  beach wear at Club Med. The women in India were/are wrapped in saris.

3. There was not the smell of curry. But to be honest, chilies hadn’t reached India either.

4. There was no Bollywood music blaring from a loudspeaker. But then in the West Indies, they would have had reggae music, no?

5. The beach wasn’t littered with trash from last night’s snack and drink like at Marina Beach.

6. When he got off the boat, there weren’t cab drivers offering him the scenic route and places to buy carpets.

7. No one tried to get him married to their brother’s sister cousin.

8. No one insisted that he and his crew come to their house for a masala dosa on a palm leaf (although they had the palm leaves).

9. There was no Keralite selling tea at a tea stall.

10. There were no off-shore IT businesses trying to recruit his crew.

Is Your Company a Tower of Babylon?

What exactly happened in Babylon? Well in Genesis 11, the writer talks about professionals working on a major construction project that was supposed to be the global projects of all global projects. For a while, deadlines were being met, but then there was a breakdown of communication. People who should understand each other started to misinterpret what the other meant. They all knew the same language, but communication wasn’t happening. No amount of venture capital could make this grand project succeed. They had all started out having a common language that they all understood. They must have understood each other because construction was progressing well for a time. I have some scenarios on what could have happened at Babylon Towers:

1. Only the supervisor of certain sections understood the common language, but his subordinates only understood their regional language. These supervisors may have been replaced with cheaper but less qualified supervisors who didn’t speak the common language as well.

2. In the beginning, different groups were more patient with one another.   As the fear of meeting deadlines became more stressful, people no longer bothered to speak more clearly or politely with needed background information. Therefore, people from other groups were getting the messages garbled. They were confused and offended.

3. As the construction got taller, it wasn’t so easy for the construction crew  to simply shout orders and responses. Workers couldn’t hear as well and were getting injured in unnecessary accidents. Management didn’t plan another way of communication as they planned the biggest sky-scrapper in the world.

I wonder how much Business and Management have learned since Genesis 11.

Why Westerners may not understand Indians

In India, Sociolinguists become little children in a big candy shop: spoiled for choice. Languages crisscross India like the fabric on a Scottish kilt or the Madras cotton print saris. Languages are like brightly colored stripes that blend into another color when they intersect, then continue merrily alone as they were before. There is little if anything homogeneous about India. It is a bouquet of cultures, classes, and religions. It is a linguistic kaleidoscope. To the visitor, it can be chaotic. This confluence or “sangram” of languages in India means that no Indian will understand the language of all Indians.

Imagine if you were visiting Europe. Each country would have a different language and culture. In India, many states have a different language and culture. So what happens when Indians move or shift as they say to another place in India? What happens when they have to deal with someone from another religion who speaks a different language or dialect? They adjust. Indians are far more sensitive to what linguists call paralinguistic features or body language than most Westerners. Indians are not as limited to language as citizens from a mono-lingual nation. From childhood, they did not always understand what people were saying around them, so they learned to read faces, the tones of a voice, the nod of the head, the windows of the eyes, the quick wave of a hand, or the stance of the body.  As children, we were all like this, but Indians needed to keep these skills.

Words don’t mean the same thing or have the same value in a multi-lingual society. So when a Westerner trainer or business person works with Indians, they are sometimes under the illusion that their words are doing all the communicating. They forget that the body language is signaling a lot more to the participants who can be confused when the words don’t match the body language. Learning doesn’t take place in seminars. Ideas are not exchanged in meetings. Directives cannot be obeyed because they weren’t understood. The speaker may say, “You’re doing a good job,” but the body language shows a tightness and insecurity, and the listener isn’t sure if the words are true.

Many westerners, especially those who live in urban communities, have lost the instinct to pick up non-verbal signals from others. What can be done? Relax.  If you have that peace of mind,  then you will give out the right signals.  If you are calm, you can pick up non-verbal communication in others and respond accordingly.

Comments are more than welcome.  I would like to learn more about this subject from you.

Twitter is blind, deaf, and could be dumb

The latest meme passing through the internet has to do with a young graduate calling herself Ciscofatty was unhappy about getting a job with Cisco.  It has been documented in this blog.  What the commenters couldn’t understand was why someone known who was qualified to be hired by Cisco would be silly enough to twitter her anxieties about the job.  The commenters did not take into account human nautre.

• People have a compulsion to unburden themselves in communication.
• They get into the habit of using a one mode of communication and forget to compartmentalize.
• Many people don’t have strong real-life social groups.
• Even if they do, what friend is available to listen to you all day long?

FUSION: The internet has brought a fusion between what we say and what we write.  Never before has there been so much semi-permanent documentation for millions of conversations.  Your friend could keep a file of all your chats.  Emails were the first of this fusion.  Now using email seems as bothersome as writing a letter with a quill pen.

COLD FUSION: The telephone was one of the first electronic devices that let us talk without seeing each other.  But at least we could hear our friend’s tone of voice, notice the pauses and the ahhh’s and ummm’s.  But with this fusion commication, we are using informal conversational language but without seeing our friend.  When we used to write formally, we reflected on the choice of our words.  We knew we would not be present to defend or define what we wrote.  We don’t have time to reflect and consider in this fusion of writing words that were only spoken before.

WATCHING: When we talk face to face, half of what we are communicating is coming from our face.  Almost the rest of what we communicate comes from our body language or the umm’s and ahhh’s.  Only 7% of what we communicate comes from our words.

LISTENING: In a face to face conversation, we get feedback immediately.  If we have been misunderstood, then we can repair the situation before our friend holds that misunderstanding too long.  We can adjust what we were going to say when we hear their voice.

When we twitter, chat, use sms, or use email for a conversation, we are blind.  We cannot see our friend as we give our words.  We can’t hear their voice.  What we say could be inappropriate and we wouldn’t have a clue.