Saturday, June 20, 2009

Jaya thinks therefore I am

Eyes are vocal, tears have tongues,/ And there are words not made with lungs. -Richard Crashaw, poet

I was asked some question which could not be structured into a form for which I could give a yes/no answer. Jaya saw a notebook nearby and got an idea. She quickly wrote down the letters of the alphabet thus:
A B C D E F G H
I J K L M N O P
Q R S T U V W X
Y Z

This became the Rosetta Stone for interpreting my dumb charades. She pointed to different letters and I blinked at the required letters. She joined them to form words and joined the words to form a sentence. In this way she managed to get the correct answer.

In order to quicken the process, Jaya would first ask me the line in which the letter will occur. For example: If I wanted to dictate "The", she will first ascertain the line in which the letter falls by saying 1,2,3,4. I will blink for line 3. Then she will start from "Q" and I will blink at 'T" and so on.

Eventually, we memorised the positions of the letters so she did not have to write them down. For most common words, if I dictate the first two or three letters, she will guess the word and if I dictate the first few words she might guess the sentence.

If you are wondering why the letters are distributed as above, stop wasting your time. Jaya just wrote down the letters on a sheet of paper and that is the way they turned out.

I didn't think of this method of communication. Even if I had thought of it first, I would not have been able to tell anyone about it. Someone else had to think of it and tell me the rules. Fortunately for me, Jaya thought of it and it has ultimately resulted in this blog. So if you are wasting too much of your time, you know who to blame!


7 comments:

  1. Kesu, this is truly one of those "funny" endings that tug at your heart.....and the two of you have done it again - make me feel ashamed that I complain about life's smaller problems.

    Is Sujith also mastering this technique?

    ReplyDelete
  2. WOW!!! that is a lot of effort !!!!
    The title of this post is very interesting & very impressive is the content. So much to learn from you two.
    'This became the Rosetta Stone for interpreting my dumb charades' :)

    Jyoti

    ReplyDelete
  3. Kailash,

    Sujit also communicates quite well with me.

    This is the first time I am commenting here.I thank all commenters on all posts for their encouragement.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Kesu, I see the makings of a beautifully written book here - it is just waiting for a publisher to discover this blog...

    ReplyDelete
  5. Kesu, thanks for the reply.

    Don't get carried away by the offers of authorship. Keep writing for us ordinary people :-)

    ReplyDelete
  6. in the best of circumstances it's difficult being a mother and a wife, so there is only thing to say about your innovative and wonderful wife: WOW.
    the only way i can deal with awkward or sensitive situations is by being stony silent or totally clumsy... so let me carry on reading your gripping blog (referred by a colleague), first posts first.
    all the very best.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Excellent Kesu!! So well explained...

    ReplyDelete