A smile speaks a thousand words or so I am hoping!

“What are we but creatures of communication and communication accurately communicated is a benison to be cherished by all species everywhere.” — Raising Steam, Terry Pratchett

As an editor, effective (or accurate) communication has become the overarching theme of my life. I find myself conscious of my speech, apologetic of goof-ups arising from a brain racing ahead of the tongue, re-reading mails and chat messages and, of course, having another editor edit my blogs.

I am learning though that there are many ways of communicating effectively and not all effective communication needs words, carefully curated by an editor.

I can speak Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam and English reasonably well. The Malayalam helps me traverse the Tamil world with minimal difficulty. However, Kannada with its sing-song intonation is new to me. And into my world has been introduced a lovely lady who doesn’t speak any of these languages. She speaks only Telugu, which apparently shares many similarities with Kannada. This wonderful lady visits me every day to help clean my house. She has a professional ethic I have often wished some of my colleagues had. She takes pride in her work and is thorough and diligent and extremely apologetic when circumstances beyond her control affect her daily routine. She has a beautiful smile and shows great initiative.

Now, I finally know why Indians are always waving their hands and nodding their heads to punctuate their words. Being part of a country with so many languages means you have to be prepared at all times to meet someone who doesn’t share a common language (or dialect) with you. So, you master the gestures that will see you through.

This amazing lady and I conduct our daily transactions through the helpful medium of gestures. It leaves a lot to be desired and occasionally we have to call on others to translate. However, what it does do is make the two of us smile a lot. We laugh in part-frustration and part-amusement when elaborate and varied gestures, which would have won us the dumb charades crown, don’t convey what we really mean. We smile at having successfully managed to make the other understand what we want and we generally smile at each other because we can’t really say much. What is really great is that my floors are cleaner than they have ever been.

I think she’s also added a few years to my life. Aw, shucks! Just when I was hoping to shuffle off these mortal coils as soon as possible!