Words as refuge

Words have a way of obscuring the real thing. We often take refuge in them and use them to say one thing, and mean something else. This happens both in our personal and professional lives. So, for example, when someone says ‘I love you’, it is a nice way of hiding many different emotions, ideas and impulses under the word ‘love’. The person to whom this statement is made also has the option of choosing meanings she thinks is appropriate in that context. In due course of time, both persons involved will know if what was said was in consonance with what happened. Actions, it is said, speak louder than words. I have used the above example because it happens to be the most used and abused statement.

Actually, I was prompted to write this article as a result of a workshop that I facilitated in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands recently. We were talking about the impact of the tsunami on young preschool aged children. The last session was a sort of visioning exercise in which the participants were asked to visualize the kind of scenario they wanted to see a few years hence with respect to young children affected by the tsunami, their growth, their environment and their development. For the sake of our discussion, I have reproduced some statements below.

‘The parents and community should participate more…’
‘The quality of the centers should be better…’
‘Those concerned should show greater commitment…’
“The preschool center should have more materials…’

This is like a nice wish list. Still, I’m not complaining because one cannot deny the situation or state in the future that these statements reflect. I also do not doubt the intentions of those who made these statements. Where I have a problem is in the utter lack of visualization in these above statements – they do not tell us much, and they cannot help us move forward. When I asked the participants what they meant when they used words like participation, quality, commitment and so on, most of them struggled to explain. The one notable exception was the statement from a participant that ‘I would like to see someone from the community walk into the preschool center everyday to see what is happening, spend some time with the teacher and children…this is part of my vision of how young children should be growing up.’ The same participant also went on to share her images of how children would be using the physical space at the center, and the activities they would be engaged in. There was feeling in what she said. You could sense it.

Imagination seems to have gone out of our lives. I realized this as I was facilitating that final session. Following years of interactions, discussions, presentations etc around the same themes and issues, we tend to convert these (and many other…) words into abstractions. It is then assumed that the other person knows what this abstraction means. Words become symbols that convey a variety of meanings, depending on the context.

This tendency for abstraction may be a natural feature of any language, and it is certainly an effective way of communicating with one another. It allows us to economize the way we use language. The danger we fall into is that we allow these words to take the place of images, so vitally important for us to dream, conceive of a better future, and invest all our energies towards making this future happen. At this epoch in human history, the exercise of imagining is even more important than before, for we face gargantuan challenges as a species to even exist.

Let us then reclaim space for imagination, dreaming…Three years ago, in 2004, I happened to attend the World Social Forum in Mumbai. The slogan at the forum was ‘Another World is Possible.’ How powerful! How beautiful…! There were so many discussions about what this slogan meant to each one of us, and many of us shared our dreams for the kind of world we wanted to see and leave for our children. This is the point I wish to make: dream, imagine, feel…for our individual and collective futures.

29th July
Leh, Ladakh, India