Saturday 24 January 2015

The other side of the river

Those who stand on the other side of the river will never comprehend your thoughts however cleverly you utter it.

Think about such a situation.
Two persons are standing on the opposite sides of a river. They talk the same language. They follow same gestures. They wear identical dresses. Their race is the same. They belong to the same gender. There is no plausible reason against a reasonable communication between them.
Still they always fail to communicate.

Communication is not just talking. It is not just showing gestures. It is reaching the other person with your thoughts. It is a meeting of thoughts and understanding.
Communication has a second part also. It is comprehending what is passed on to us. It is a sending and receiving process. One part of the process is incomplete without the other part.


A word whether written or spoken or a gesture that does not reach the other person is only a fruitless exercise. It benefits none.
Whoever transfers his thoughts to the other person is a success in communication.

The person on this side of the river has something very serious to communicate. He is a good speaker, a good writer and a good grammarian. He is excellent in articulation. He is dedicated to the thoughts he want to communicate. He spares no effort in communicating his sincere thought to the other person standing on the other side of the river.

The person on the other side of the river is not defiant to different thoughts. In fact he is thirsty for fresh knowledge. He is eager to hear and comprehend what the person on this side of the river says.

Still they do not communicate to each other.

The person on this side of the river is articulating his thoughts fervently. He sincerely wants to communicate with the other person on the other side of the river. But the one on the other side of the river fails to comprehend anything. He hears only sounds at various pitches. It conveyed no meaning to him. It seemed that the the wind that traveled on the waves in the river carried away all the meaning leaving behind only high sounds and low sounds.

Why the one stands on this side of the river failed to communicate to the other one? Why the other one standing on the other side of the river failed to comprehend the spoken thoughts of the one on this side?

There may be satisfactory scientific explanation for this. I agree with all those explanations. But the simple fact is that, they cannot communicate to each other because they are standing on the opposite sides of the river. At least they are standing on two different sides of the river.

The river is the same. Two men are physically and biologically identical. But the plain they stand are different. That makes all the difference. They are standing on two different plains created and sustained by the same river.

This is an interesting fact about rivers. A river can create and sustain many, different and unidentical shores. The same race living on these shores fails to communicate with each other.

 Those who stand on the other side of the river will never comprehend your thoughts however cleverly you utter it.
And that's why we often fail to communicate however cleverly we utter our thoughts.
This is sad, indeed.

Professor Jacob Abraham

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