Kaniguma - Language and Lessons

Language has always been a binary entity in my life. It was either Tamil or English, with an added pride of a Tamilian's thoughts. "Why bother learning another one?".

A few striking experiences have entirely changed my attitude towards languages in the past few days.

Why do we communicate? 

What are the intention and purpose?

How do we define our perceptions to the beings listening to us? 

The willingness to communicate is an integral part of myself. I m a person with a chaotic mind, always searching for a reason to resonate my thoughts with people around me. Sometimes I succeed. But most of the time, I don't. I go out of the way, involving myself in arguments and carry a sense of ego about my understanding. More than the willingness to put my thoughts into words, I become rigid in not compromising my judgments during a conversation. As a result, the purpose of communication gets distorted.

Language and desire to communicate took a dichotomous relationship in my mind. I got uncomfortable about this new selfishness in connecting with people around me.

For the past few years, I m lucky to have a new set of friends who don't hail from any specific language. English became a savior and saved me. But now with my growing interest in sociology, I have realized my barriers in the inability to communicate to a common man. My English builds a fence around myself and only the elite. With my traveling, I find myself not able to connect with my fellow passenger, I couldn't appreciate the food served to me, I couldn't thank the good souls who guide me or help me and above all, I couldn't learn anything from them. 

Like me, for most of the people, English is a foreign language that drains many emotions and displays an intellectual point of view. Our mother tongue always is close to heart and we always resort to the first language we learned as a child when we are vulnerable and are desperate to communicate.

With all the above webs of thoughts, I arrived at Swasthya Swaraj a few days back. The organization works at around 72 remote tribal villages of Kalahandi district, Odisha for their betterment of health. It is an inspiring work by the founder Dr. Aquinas. Their work is mainly focussed on the community itself, for that reason, they have trained local tribal women to become health workers. Their recent program has included tribal girls to become community health practitioners.

I have been given the responsibility to teach them the little obstetrics I know. I accepted the offer, with a sheer ignorance of my incapabilities. The next few days have been an enlightening experience.

Every day, me and my guide Ravi, start for a 55km journey from Bavanipatna, the district headquarters to their rural center, Kaniguma. Kaniguma is in a lush green valley, immersed completely in the blessing of monsoon now. There is no color in the vicinity except for green and the rains refuse to stop the whole day. The village has a background sound of all the streams flowing by, watering the fields. As soon as reach, we head towards the shop opposite to the bus stop, for our breakfast. He serves food in a bowl made of local siali leaves, which usually has two puris, aloo channa, aloo bonda and two gulgulas (delicious odiya sweet) -  all together for 10 rupees!!

We walk for a few meters to reach Swasthya Swaraj community training center, where six tribal girls reside and get trained for their community health practitioner program. They are bright, inquisitive, first-generation learners who aspire to work for their community. The first day, I struggled and shut myself because of the language mismatch. Both I and they are bilingual, except for the fact that they are four entirely different languages and nothing in common. On my side, it's English and Tamil. On their side, its Odiya and Hindi. I realized my stupidity for my taken for the granted idea that my intellectual subject knowledge was all I thought about and not about the medium of communication.

But to my surprise, things fell into place. For two main reasons. First and foremost is their curiosity to understand the class. These 6 kids, never let me even utter one extra sentence, unless all of them understood what I had told. "samaj nahi, didi" is a constant repetitive sentence in the class, making me define concepts, draw pictures, show videos and demonstrate models. When I introspect now, I have never been a part of a class like this, where the whole class collectively makes sure that understanding is what class is all about. 

The second reason made me realize what language is about. "The willingness to make the human connection". I learned to whither off my teacher attitude since I m not a teacher. I m as well an ignorant student like them, wherein they teach me the language, making more sense to my"self". 

Every day, with every class, it brings me immense happiness that they learn obstetrics and also is an immense privilege for me to learn language from them. I no more have the prejudices I had for languages anymore. I have been shown by these kids that, Human connection changes the whole picture. I look around myself now, and realize that the fences are broken, the judgments are shattered and I m a mere human being to learn more, to engage with people. If that necessitates me to read a new scripture or a listen to a new set of words, I m privileged to do that....

During the return journey, my level of satisfaction builds up more every day and that's what all this is for.

Language is a tool to express emotions and knowledge.

The intention is the real form of communication.

"For communication to have meaning it must have a life. It must transcend "you and me" and become "us." If I truly communicate, I see in you a life that is not me and partake of it. And you see and partake of me. In a small way, we then grow out of our old selves and become something new. To have this kind of sharing I cannot enter into a conversation clutching myself. I must enter into it with loose boundaries. I must give myself to the relationship, and be willing to be what grows out of it." - 

Hugh Prather