Sounds of Communication: My Unfolding Voyage 43

Most Bengalis would write the spelling of the Bengali word for number One (1) as "a-k" pronounced as 'ache' but will actually say "ack" as one says 'pack' with silent 'p' or 'act' with silent 't'. Human beings seem to enjoy inconsistency and confusing variety while communicating. In the childhood days, when we were learning English at the primary school, some elder would jokingly ask if 'b-u-t' is 'baat' and 'c-u-t' is 'kaat', then what is 'p-u-t'? They expected us to reply close to 'paat' and not 'poot'. The Americans seem to pronounce the letter 'Z' close to 'Jee' or 'Gee' rather than close to 'jed' or 'razed' with 'ra' silent as they do in England or Pakistan or India or Poland. My Bengali daughter-in-law studied in London for sometime: she teaches my grand daughter 'Z' for 'Zeebra' and not something close to 'Jjebra'. My Mangalorean daughter-in-law pronounces the Bengali / Hindi word 'Bhooth" meaning ghost as 'Booth' as she is not aware that the Kannadi (her mother tongue) Alphabet does have the letter "Bha" (close to cursive 'w' with a waving hand on the right top and a dot below 'w' whereas 'ba' is written as plain cursive 'w'. My wife laughs at my Hindi pronunciation. I seldom pronounce Newark the way my son pronounces : I say something close to ' New Arc" while he sounds more close to 'Nooark'. Most people enjoy Buffet dinner along with little Miss Muffet sitting on a Tuffet but I do not enjoy whether the 't' in Buffet remains silent or not: some enjoy 'Booffe', some 'Baaffe' and others 'Baa-fet'. We soon learn to adjust to and enjoy sounding differences among us. It had taken me almost an year before I could understand what the Irish Father Principal in long, white robes used to express: what I used to hear the St. Mary's Principal say was a low decibel  humming / buzzing sound that turned into English sentences with the passage of time.


It is occasionally that we land into problems or embarrassment, especially when you have little time to tune in the reception device to the transmitting device. It was early Autumn in 1965. I alighted from the bus as it slowed down at the crossing the Harrison Road (Mahatma Gandhi Road, after Rabindranath Tagore penned down his dream in which the Harrison Road moved like a snake, and after Tagore's death) and the College Street (the new name, I do not recollect). I crossed over to the western footpath of the College Street, entered the College and walked westwards along the pathway beside the big playground. I found a foreign gentleman slowly walking along the way. I was walking fast to reach the classroom in time. The gentleman asked about the location of the Department. I told him that I was a student of the same department and was going there and I would escort him to the particular professor of the department he had said he had to meet. As we were walking together we were having a conversation. I had difficulty in tuning to his accent, probably American. I had to repeatedly say 'beg your pardon' (something like 'come again, sorry' used nowadays) so that I could hear what he was saying at least twice. But I could not make out one particular question he had asked even after he repeated the same thrice. I did not know what to do but just said 'yes' on the assumption that the answer to his question could be either 'yes' or 'no'. He did not say anything thereafter except thanking me after I escorted him to his destination. Later that afternoon he would give a lecture to the faculty and students of the Economics Department of the Presidency College. I do not remember what he spoke about both because I might not have been sufficiently educated on the subject and my difficulty in tuning into his accent.

God is said to exist in everything despite differences in forms and shapes. God therefore must exist in sound despite the differences in the meaning of the sounds emanating from the transmitter and the capability of the receiver. The great diversity probably makes it virtally impoosible to get to God. My new colleague at my new employers' office in 1982 had once remarked and tried to convince me that I had lot of knowledge about 'cool'. It took me quite a while before I could understand that he had been referring to my previous employment with Coal India Ltd for five years. After the Tamils hit upon the idea of dropping the British name of the capital city of their state from Madras to Chennai and the Maharashtrian'ss changed over from the British Bombay to Indian Mumbai, the communist government repeated the revolution by dropping the British name Calcutta to rename West Bengal's capital city as 'Kolkata'. The Bengalis have a proud educated elite who dabble in languages and literature. Unlike Mumbai and Chennai - two names that were virtually unknown, Calcutta was popularly known as Kolkata since long among the Bengalis. The Bengalis would write Kolkata in Bengali, everyone would write Calcutta in English and the Hindi-speaking would refer to the same city as 'Call-kattaa'. So soon after Calcutta's English name was dropped and substituted by the Bengali name written in English letters as Kolkata, the airlines' flight-crew started calling the city as 'Call-Cata'. Once I had to suggest to one of the air-hostesses that in Bengali, Kolkata was pronounced as 'Coal -kaataa'. But they had their own non-Bengali accent habits not permitting them to pronounce Kolkata in the same manner as the Bengalis did. So the City has several names now: pronounced 'Callikaataa', 'CoalKaataa', Kolkata, Calcutta and 'Call-kattaa'. What's in a name: the City of remains where it was as Tagore after awaking from the dream had found: "Calikaataa Aaachhe Callikatataa -tei'. Nouns with differing pronunciations may not create much of a noise problem in the sound waves of communication.

But when verbs, adverbs and adjectives are also pronounced differently, the noise increases. The receiver may have problems in tuning in. Add to that the problem that the distance from the transmitter to the receptor may creates in the communication. In the undergraduate course, the number of students in minor subjects used to be about 100 against the strength of 10 -20 students in the class for honors (subject in which one would major). Mathematics was one my minor subjects: I needed to attend the classes to get the adequate percentage of attendance to be eligible to appear in the university examination and also to pick up knowledge in the classroom itself as I would not have time at home to allocate for studying minor subjects. For the second objective to be effectively served the sounds of communication had to be without disturbance or noise. But there were several reasons why this was not possible in the classes on Astronomy. There were about 100 students in a sprawling class room of the older variety; huge height and large windows that were kept open to allow air in along with all the sounds outside the classroom. Distance from the teacher was long. Second, the terms of astronomy are not very common except words like planets, stars, twlight, eclipse etc. The analytical tools are different from other branches of mathematics, so are the units of measurements. The major problem was one of dealing with location and movement and motion of planets in the n- dimensional space to be captured in the two dimensional sheet of paper in the books and note pads. Third, we had a brilliant young teacher to help us: he was very serious in teaching us. But the sound of communication was ineffective. I could not keep my receptive ears tuned to what he was trying to transmit verbally while drawing circular diagrams on the black board. What I would hear was a kind of low decibel humming sound with occasional emphasis on certain words pronounced to produce sound waves that my ears failed to attune to. The classroom's large open windows let more of external sounds in than allowing light to come: his skin color and the white chalk strokes were gobbled up by the black hole of the board.

Yet I had to attend his class to get my attendance percentage to the desired level. But one day, all of a sudden the entire classroom became silent midway through the class. I looked up to him and found that he along with all other students were looking at me. I stood up as he asked as to what I had been doing. He thought I was asleep in the class with my heads down. I told him the Truth: "Scribbling on my notebook, Sir". I did not know what he understood, nor did I understand what he said in response to my reply. He soon resumed his discourse. I had to learn astrology from the textbook on my own just because of the problematic sounds of communication.
Earlier, I had faced a somewhat similar situation. All of a sudden there was a pin-drop silence in the class and I had to stop gossiping in the low voice with my friend. Both of us looked up to the teacher. The teacher and the entire class of 100 odd students were looking at me. The teacher pointed at me and asked."What are you doing". I replied that I was sorry. He then briefly expressed his anger: he said that the classroom was not for gossiping and that if I had not found attending his class interesting enough, I should have left the class room. It was really very embarrassing. I immediately walked out of the classroom and did not cared to know what happened afterwards. That was the last time I had met my friend and other 100 studentas in the class.. The professor was teaching political science. My friend was my classmate in the school and was studying undergrad course in Manindra Chandra College, where my eldest sister had studied two decades before my friend took admission to that college. I had gone to meet my friend at his college. He said he had a class to attend and I agreed to accompany him in the class. The teacher started his lecture and the students in the back benches where we were sitting engaged themselves into activities other than listening to what the teacher was saying. My school friend and I had entered into a low-volume but intensive chatting session that had to end abruptly because the teacher had sharp eyes to spot us doing so. Thanks to the conducive environment that this Professor of Political Science had created through his lecture.

During my unfolding voyage in the future, I had to learn communication sound waves the hard way.