Between words and actions!

When I was young, Amma thought I was a disappointment. In her mind, she felt that children had to be loud, commanding and cocksure about everything - not, like her son, passive, agreeing to most everything and giving too much space for the benefit of the doubt.

She would often quote that this neighbour's son is brilliant and speaks well, that the neighbour's kid is doing well in school, and that I should pick a cue or two from them to succeed in life. Actually, she was more colourful in expressing her disappointment.

The truth of the matter is, in my opinion, most domineering mothers give rise to submissive children. It is not so much that it is genetically coded; it is a case of conditioned nurturing.

Amma's mantra is that to succeed in life, one has to have confidence and the gift of the gab. Her tough childhood in post-WWII Malaya made her and her siblings acquire the enviable skills of street smartness and the ability to sell ice to Eskimos.

Like the eyes, the mouth and the words it expresses are the window to what lies within the soul. One must be articulate to capture hearts in interviews and win arguments or elections. My siblings and I miserably disappointed Amma in that department.

I do not think there is any wisdom in Amma's view of the world. Two contemporary examples took my thoughts back.

The present PM was such a good orator that everybody in the country thought he was the solution to all the nation's problems. Conveniently, the then PM then had scandals after scandals that he tried to push under the carpet. Naturally, the current PM was given the mandate to take the realm. Two years into his leadership, everyone can see he can talk much better than he can rule.

The first round of the US Presidential Debate had started. Democrats and Republicans agree that it was a sad state of something hardly resembling a debate. Trump did not have to draw his trademark tirades against Biden but wait for him to fumble and mumble. If articulation and verbosity were so crucial in convincing voters, what did the Democrats think when they agreed to allow a senile and obviously ill Biden to take the rostrum?

Action speaks louder than words. If Modi's modus operandi were anything to go by, an effective leader must work below the surface, calculating and executing his moves without having multiple press releases and public declarations of intent. He must be seen doing things, not just talking or at least walking the talk.

On a sobering note, my siblings and I have not done too poorly for ourselves. The people that Amma asked to emulate and look up to as role models did not end up meeting Amma's expectations in adulthood.

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Of introverts, intellect and talking...

The Quiet Girl (An Cailín Ciúin, Irish: 2022)
Written and Directed: Colm Bairéad

My sisters and I were brought up to believe that only empty vessels make a lot of noise. Through Aesop's fables, we were told to keep our mouths shut. The story of three good friends, a tortoise and two wild geese, comes to mind. In the tale, the three friends planned a guided flight away from their habitat, a drying-up pond. The problem was that the tortoise could not fly. So the geese held either end of a long stick, and the tortoise bit the middle portion with its mouth with strict instructions never to open its mouth when they were cruising at a high altitude. And that is precisely what the tortoise did, opening its gap to praise the beauty of a 'bird's eyes view' of Earth. The end could have been more pleasant.

Children were expected to be seen and admired afar but not heard. But no says techniques of modern parenting. Children are encouraged to express their feelings. They advocate a Socratic type of learning, not to be fed with knowledge but to seek them instead. They participate in familial decision-making, perhaps visiting a gynaecologist's practice too. 

Now I also have learned that more intelligent people are less talkative. Since their basal arousal to know is high, they are said to constantly learn from the stimuli around them. Further stimulation in the form of incessant banter, overwhelming extrovert interactions and music may be offputting. Hence, many recoil into their introvert's cocoon. Arthur Schopenhauer posited that a high intellect tends to make a man unsocial'. That says little about lawyers, businessmen and politicians who source their potential clients mainly through social interactions and social functions. Persuasion via vocalisation forms a crucial crux of their reason for existence.

This Irish nomination to the Oscars is a poignant coming-of-age drama of a 9-year-old girl, Cáit, who grows up in an impoverished family. Day-to-day living is hard with a lazy unemployed father with hardly any money to go around to feed too many mouths. To top it up, her mother is pregnant with her fifth pregnancy. Obviously, there is hardly any love to go around. Cáit is sent off to spend her summer with a distant middle-aged relative to ease the burden of caring for another child. 

Cáit, the quiet girl, is received well by the middle-aged couple who themselves had lost their young child earlier. After a frosty start, Cáit becomes close to them. For the first time, she finds the love of a family and the comfort and security of a home. Then it is time to return...

An engaging movie with superb acting and retro cinematography, sending viewers back in time to 1981 Ireland. Recommended, 4.5/5.

(PS. Somebody once told me that every word we utter reverberates in the Universe forever. Like the flutter of a butterfly and the start of a typhoon, the sound waves emitted from our vocal cords definitely affect the course of Earth and the things around us. Just because we all have a mouth each, it is no excuse to yak and yak for no reason. Talk only when needed. No more and no less.)

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Speak for the sake of it?

We say a lot of things that we do not mean and do many things that we do not say. What we say may not be relevant in just two years, what more a lifetime. It is ironic that since most of the human interaction is based on verbal communications, we still cannot trust what we say. Are they just smokescreens for us to achieve our desires at all cost? Do we promise the moon and the stars, without mentioning the fine prints, just to get things our way?

The direction of society and our lives is guided by our art of persuasion in debates and speech, but yet verbal communications are just fillers to decorate our lives; an exercise in creative writing to trigger the limbic system to immerse the brain in euphoria. One wonders if speech is relevant anymore.

Maybe it is time for us to periodically reassess our promises. Like at the end of a rotation duty of a security officer who plays back the closed-circuit recordings of the night before, perhaps we should be doing the same. We should put an interval upon which we should assess and re-assess what we had set out to do in our lives. Sometimes, we would look back at the promises of the past, laugh it off as a jest of the spring of youth which mellowed down with the lessons of the School of Hard Knocks. Unfortunately, sometimes the whole spectre of our existence may have stemmed from our earlier rhetoric. Could we be punished for our blabber during our innocence?

Like an episode in Black Mirror where computer chips are implanted at the back of the neck for people to rewind and reanalyse all their memories, do we need retrieval facilities to make culpable to whatever we say? 

The best thing to do is strap our belts, avoid those potholes, keep our eyes on the road whilst at the same time enjoy the landscape, keep the hands tight on the steering wheel, follow the rules, enjoy the journey and re-live the trip every now and then even if we do not reach the intended destination.

So, speak for the sake of it. You would probably do not mean any of it, anyway!

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