Mistake me for what, a clown?! The clause don’t mistake me is classic Indian English for do not misunderstand what I’ve said or don’t misconstrue what I’ve said, just like other great additions of our nation to the English language – cousin sister, co-brother, prepond, close the tap, and so on. No, my objective is not to flaunt my little knowledge of the English language (as is common practice down South of India) – I like to see languages as they are.
So the objective of this post is to put forward the importance of effective communication. A few months ago, I played a game of chinese whispers (a.k.a. telephone, gossip, le téléphone arabe, stille post and so on) with a bunch of my friends. Hey, it’s that game when one person whispers a phrase to the next and it goes on in a chain and you try to see if the information has been passed on right to the last person. And of course – the message was lost when it went to the third person in line. What’s the relevance? I’ll tell you why. It begins with my receiving a million e-mail forwards everyday (yeah, it’s an exaggeration, I get at most 4 a day). I seldom forward them, but I do read every single forward that reaches my inbox. Some of them are fun to read, some plain stupid (my blog-post kinds), some informative (gets me all excited at times, and I choose to forward them), and the rest are just boring.
A while back I got this e-mail regarding rule 49-o of the Indian constitution/book-of-rules/election-guide/whatever. Especially with the voting season setting in, I was all pumped up to share what I found out with my friends and forwarded it to a lot of people. Right after that, I decided to do some research on the thing – turns out that part of that email was a hoax – the part which said re-elections would be conducted under certain circumstances. Anyways, if you’re very keen on knowing more about it, look it up my older post, or on God given gift to dorks, or their own awareness site. And right after I read this, I sent a second mail clarifying what I’d written earlier – yeah, not many bother doing that I know.
Second case. I got an e-mail forward this morning about how you can save someone experiencing a stroke. And in case you’re still bummed, a stroke occurs when there’s a clot in one of your arteries (those tubes that take blood around your body) leading to your brain. The brain needs fresh blood, and if it doesn’t get it, it’s not good. So this mail I got tells you how you can identify someone having a stroke. Use the words STR (ask the stroke-ing to Smile symmetrically, then Talk coherently, and Raise both arms – if they screw up any of these, you can panic and call for an ambulance). So I thought I’ll enlighten the few who read my blog with this information, and thought I’ll google it up before I put it up on my website, and the first google hit for identifying a stroke was a link to Hoax Slayer. It turns out that a person could be having a stroke even without showing any of these symptoms. Can you believe it? There’s actually a website that goes around busting myths about email forwards! Whether those guys are jobless or not is debatable.
So here’s my request to entusiastic e-mail forwarders, “do a little research on the e-mails you send – it helps to convey the right message across to people.”
P.S.: If you want to read more about how to identify a stroke, look it up the hoax-slayer link earlier, or on Pony’s site, or at About.com.
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