Unexpected Communication

Hey everyone

I have not yet gotten my blog up to date, making this post seem a little counterproductive, but I felt like I should share one of the more special experiences that I've had since I arrived in India that justh appened to me literally an hour ago. I'm sure this type of thing has happened during other abroad experience over the last 20 (almost 21 *yikes*) years of my life, but only noticed how incredible it was for the first time today. If any of you have read Paolo Coelho, this is a similar situation to one of his short stories that I read the other day (which is why it was really ironic that this happened; maybe the universe is sending me a sign).

It was 12:00 pm; the Indian sun was at its apex, but luckily it hadn't reached the hottest part of the day yet. I was with my interpreter Senthil on his two wheeler motorbike, running errands for my Independent Study project on land purchases due to rapid urbanization and its effects on farmers' livelihoods. We had just come from visiting a nearby school that had been built on land bought from a farmer that I had talked to the day before. As we took the turn out of the school, I noticed the back wheel of our motorbike was dragging a little too much, and so did Senthil. He muttered the Tamil curse word "chit" (that can mean, great, damn it, fuck, shit, depending on your vocabulary) and said that we needed to find the nearest tire valla (tire vendor). Finding a tire valla, however, was to be a little harder than initially thought-- we were currently 20 kms from the outskirts of Madurai; all we saw were a few tea stalls and a group of men repairing and repainting three massive dump trucks to be used for some type of life job in the future. My interpreter stopped near the men with the dump trucks, told them in Tamil what the problem was, and the men wagged their head back and forth (the S. Indian version of a nod), pointed in the direction of the nearest tire vendor, and Senthil ran off to find a tire seller.

So there I sat with five Indian men dressed in lungis (a large cloth used as a type of manskirt-- decorated with ornate designs-- usually this cloth denotes that these men are of the working class) for the next 30 minutes or so in the shade of a giant tamarind tree. One of the men approached me and asked me what I was doing here. I told him I was a student in America studying in Madurai for the semester. He nodded and then asked me how I liked India. I said that I loved it; especially the food. He laughed. I asked him what he did for a living. He told me he drove trucks and got them ready to drive, which is what he and the others were doing now. He asked my age. I'm 20 I said. I'm 23 he said. We smiled at each other, a similar generational happiness, at our conversation. Two kids normally separated by half a world meeting for the first time.

Then I realized something I hadn't really noticed while I was talking to him: he had been speaking Tamil the whole time, and I had been responding in English, and yet we had little to no difficulty understanding what we were saying. The miracle of human communication had connected two people that couldn't be more different of background: I found out later that he had lived in a village his whole life; on the other hand, I had been to India twice in my life, and had been moving around ever since I can remember (rarely staying in one city or town for more than a year). It was then that I realized how special we all are, and how easy it is to understand if we honestly tried to do so. When we share our lives, we want people to listen; we just need a person with adjustable ears: one that can understand and listen with perfect clarity at all experiential sound wave levels. If we wanted to truly understand our needs, experiences, grievences, and knowledge, we could do so if we had the urge to hear the other talk without bound about his/her life. How simple conflicts would be if the egoism of our own interests would never block our ears!

My friends and family pride themselves on calling me a space cadet that can zone out with just a moment's notice, and totally miss what people say or tell me. From now on, I'm gonna seek to change that. I've heard from people that you gain the best friends in life if you are able to listen as well as you talk. Since I don't have the talking thing down very well (as most people know, I'm an awkward talker, especially after being in Madurai and losing about half of my working english vocabulary due to under-exposure), I think I'm gonna try and use my ears to communicate more often.

Hasan