Why the bloody hell are you here - how communication is decoded

 It was 2006 when I had first seen the Australian tourism ad and I remember it to date. The bold copy caught my attention and it also was quite unlike any overly-crafted-full-of-beautiful-things tourism ad.

This is what my mind registered of the ad since the precursor to this ad was an article titled - curse at them, they will come? The title of the article was the lense through which I perceived that ad. Having done that, I started spinning my own yarn.

What a quaint way to get people to their country…compare this to the effort launched by the Indian tourism authorities, preaching all and one to treat the guest as God, this was rather bold !!!

Why would someone go to their country I wondered? They are a plain-speaking and friendly lot. Maybe that is what they wish to project through the advertising.

And that is how most communication gets decoded.

A thought experiment on communication decoding

Fast forward 17 years, yesterday morning I randomly watched the Rajasthan tourism ad (complete coincidence it was about tourism again :)

After a few seconds of watching, the thought that crossed my mind was

Pehle woh giri, ab yeh bhi girega (First she fell, next he will). I couldn’t stop laughing. I wanted to change the Monday morning mood for a few of my friends and sent it to them.

A fitness enthusiast said

“This guy has to be incredibly fit to carry her all through the honeymoon”

A senior citizen said

“40 years after marriage, you’ll start wondering…Aisa bhi hota hai kya?!!

A brand-led growth specialist said…

TG: Rich NRIs, so they got that right.

It begins with her ankle breaking so you get hooked on. And they’ve stitched different parts of Rajasthan nicely in the story. Showing how he cares about her brings up emotions. Music and lyrics are typical and boring in Rajasthani style, but people will remember khamma ghani which is the signature they want people to remember.

Tg part- by showing an NRI girl with a white guy, they’ve made it relevant for NRIs, white people and Indians

Someone who works with underprivileged girls to restore agency said…

I think the ad only caters to people who want to splurge and get married in Rajasthan. And it doesn't quite capture everything Rajasthan offers. The art is missing entirely, it's only romanticized as a 'love destination' which is so reductive.

Of course, there's the damsel in distress and saviour narrative too, which is cringy, but theek hai, at least they look like they're in love and nothing wrong with that too. Bachara itna mehnat कर raha hai.

Tourism का ad kam, Made In Heaven season 3 का ad zyada hai.

A storyteller and a documentary filmmaker said…

Bandish Bandits

Do you see the connection between the ‘who’ and the ‘what was said’

Bottom line - we see the same stimulus using the lens that matters to us the most and we spin our own yarn  And that is how most communication gets decoded. This lens might change depending on the shift in values, what is top of mind or a trigger situation or an unforgettable memory and the same person might think of the same stimuli differently at different points in time depending on which fragment of thought he/she pulls out of his/her subconscious mind at that moment. I have seen this happen even when people read print material - books, posters etc - the same message gets interpreted differently. 

Memory is not static, memory is constructed - subtly different each time you recall an incident. Likewise, reality is also not static, but a construct of our mind. 

In my case, I had a foot fracture on a holiday a few years ago while walking down the steps! And my mind could not ignore those steps in the Rajasthan tourism ad.

Why I say most communication and not all, is because there is another interesting way in which communication gets encoded - which is playback. But that takes a big fat media budget and the same message being heard/seen over multiple exposures. That is why we still remember   

Sunday ho yaan Monday roz khao Anday - a tagline from the 1980s when life and media vehicles were uncluttered.

I have seen the instrument of ‘playback’ working very well these days, not in the context of communication but in the context of narrative building that happens through the informal flow of information that moves across social media vehicles, endorsed by celebrity opinion leaders and regurgitated by individuals who simply buy into that story without verifying the fact. Since that is the beauty of playback. Superfoods that come as pills and capsules - remember Ginseng?

When a big company tells its unsuspecting consumers that its bottled spread is full of the freshest fruit with the goodness of vitamins, most of India believes it since subliminally the message seeps in and gets reinforced and hardwired over and over again - unless you have reason to doubt or question it.

Coming back to the Australian tourism ad which I misinterpreted. It was actually something like this…

The ad begins with characters saying: "We've poured you a beer and we've had the camels shampooed, we've saved you a spot on the beach ... and we've got the sharks out of the pool."

A bikini-clad woman then asks….

I hope this is a story you will not forget. So the next time you are planning to use your communication budget, if you know in advance whether it is a playback you are expecting or a spin-a-yarn in return, that could change the way your communication is designed.

Town Mouse City Mouse

Last month en route to Goa, I spent an evening in Unkal. The contrast between the children I encountered in these two places was stark. 

Meandering through the town streets, I happened to enter a church. I expected it to be empty though was pleasantly surprised by a group of children old and young sincerely practising for their dance & skit performance. I asked them if I could sit and watch for a while. They were warm and welcoming. They made eye contact and smiled. 

We also had a brief conversation about what the kids were doing there late evening. I learnt they were part of the VBS (Vacation Bible Class). The church was a safe space for the kids to learn something useful and not fall into the wrong company. It made perfect sense. During my recent research conversations with mothers in Kanpur and Indore, almost all the moms I spoke to lamented about the lack of a safe space where their kids could hang out in the company of other children. The small townhouses open up on busy streets and that makes it not just physically unsafe but also exposes their children to language and behaviour that may not be age-appropriate. Hence most children stay indoors devoid of same-age company and free play. By contrast, the Unkal church kids spent their mornings and evenings at the church. The hot breakfast at church was a bonus. The church functioned like a community centre, welcoming even strangers like us. A few mothers were hanging out there too after their day's work. Posters made by the children, with empowering messages, adorned the walls. A whiteboard with the exact count of children across age groups who attended the VBS each day signalled to me that this was not a casual activity. 

The children (mostly 8-10-year-olds) were remarkably calm and less fidgety. The sincerity to learn something new was apparent on their faces. When their instructor asked them to observe her, I did not see their attention flitting here or there. They were all eyes on the instructor. “They are so distinctly different from us”, pointed my city mouse. “Many a time the city mice are constantly fidgeting, fiddling around with themselves or others and are easily distracted”. We explored why and came up with a hypothesis that this could be attributed to their lifestyle and environment that was not flooded with stimulation. We also observed a lot more independence and risk-taking in the town mice and their parents doing their own thing and not hovering around them. 

The next day at Goa was a completely different experience. There was a wedding to attend. My city mouse was looking for some same-age company. I assured her, going by my old memories of weddings that there would be lots of children to play with and even if we don't know them, they’ll end up befriending each other in no time. George Ball, an American diplomat, said “Nostalgia is a seductive liar”. Like a talented seductress, nostalgia will rope you in and cause you to lose sight of reality. And so it did. 99% of the children at the venue, irrespective of age had a personal digital device they were glued to. They hardly ate, ran, or even looked up and away from their screens. The adults around them chatted away amongst themselves. What was worse was even when these children were not with their devices they would not make eye contact with others or smile. Conversation with them was a distant dream. 

I wondered, how would they learn the art of making conversations that the town mice were so easily adept at. What would be the long-term effects of social ineptitude or a lowering attention span on their life, health and future? Is there a tipping point beyond which over-exposure does a disservice to a child rather than making him smart? In a generation growing up with devices, would simple skills like connecting with other humans, being able to read body language or sustaining conversations give someone an edge over the rest? 

I remember visiting Kashmir as an 8-year-old and another child on the bus journey between Srinagar and Jammu carrying a bagful of snow back home, only to realise somewhere along the way that it will eventually melt. As we crossed Unkal on our way back to Bangalore, I felt like that child who wanted to bag the simplicity, fewer choices and a more focused environment of the town and bring it back home as a gift for the city mouse who lives with me, though somewhere along the way, within a few days of having reached the city, that would all just melt or maybe I just needed a different metaphor - one that would last!

A big mess - what do children like about it?

Children have their own logic, their own sense of right and wrong, fair and unfair. It is fascinating to peek into their world. Mess is a child's best friend. I used to always wonder why. Then one day, I stopped wondering and asked a child and this is what emerged. LISTEN IN

Play! Play! Play !

Playtime is zealously guarded. Ask children to cut short their playtime by even five minutes and they would morph into master negotiators, number crunching the minutes and seconds they have been deprived of. The possibilities of what play brings to a child's world are infinite. Here are just a few. Listen in!

#demystifyingchildhood, #earlychildhood #earlychildhoodeducation

The truth is out there

What are the threads that connect star gazing, birding and people-watching? Besides curiosity of course. 

Last weekend I spent some time trailing an astronomer and a bird watcher as these two different people went about their work. Some fascinating connections emerged between their domain of work and mine. 

But the truth does not come with a label

To the uninitiated a statement like ‘Let's go star gazing or bird watching’, creates a mental image, an expectation that whatever one is out to see would be ‘out there’ right in front of your eyes, magnified, labelled and perhaps within enough range to be able to take a praiseworthy picture. If there are interconnections the trajectory for those would also be chalked out. The expectation then is to experience space as one would in a planetarium or a forest bird as one would in a documentary. 

The reality is quite the opposite. One can spend hours and not find anything noteworthy. Worse still, one could be amidst a group of people some of whom point to rare sightings of birds and constellations, while others feel frustrated or foolish since they are not able to see what the others have been able to. 

What I gathered is, whether it is a behavioural insight or a constellation or a rare bird, while it is ‘out there’, it could be distant, could be very well camouflaged amidst the noise, and will definitely not come with a neat little label or a spotlight shining on its head. Hence while it is there, it is seldom visible to an untrained eye - even on a clear night sky or in the middle of a forest with birds aplenty 

One has to seek out the truth. 

And technology (whether it was a telescope or a sophisticated lens or a data-churning tool) does not make the process of discovery any easier. In fact quite the contrary - it is the human, the expert whose senses (eyes, ears, brain) have got attuned to the nuances of that search will spot it first. It is the human expert who makes the interconnections between the call of the bird, the direction it comes from, and correlates it with the subtle movements around the trees and hypothesizes something is there. Technology only does the job of amplifying it.  

Like a forest or the star-filled sky, a new subject of research feels overwhelming at first. One does not know where to start, or how big, wide or deep the problem is. But there are always markers - like the twin stars that signal the constellation of Gemini is somewhere close or the three in a row to signal one has landed on Orian. In a social problem too, the Polaris will make its presence felt by something that one hears repeatedly at different points of time in a discussion or from different individuals. That is when one has landed on the first marker which has the potential to unravel the rest. 

The truth which is not definitive

Everyone looked at the same sky or forest but everyone saw different things. Often a single question that someone asked would trigger off an animated discussion on subjects ranging from culture, and history to philosophy. We spotted the twin stars - Arundhati and Vashishta through the telescope, not visible to the naked eye. As part of a ritual, these two stars were shown to newlyweds as an auspicious symbol of a supportive marriage. This triggered the discussion about - whether there would have had telescopes in marriage halls. The fact that they could spot these stars in earlier times without any equipment meant they had perfect vision and clearer skies which we do not have today due to light pollution apart from air pollution. How electricity has altered our bio-rhythms and maybe distant gazing also kept their vision healthy in earlier days. 

If we would have spotted another constellation that day and not the Big Dipper that the twin stars were a part of, our discussions would have turned in a different direction. 

When we study a subject in research, at any point we unearth only a part of the overwhelming complex truth about it. And what we end up understanding depends so much on the questions we chose to ask. At a different time, the same phenomenon being studied would reveal a new dimension or facet of the truth. Nothing is constant in nature and in life too people think differently about the same subject depending on the filters they use. Like it is with the universe, so it is with the human mind, it is only over time can we start piecing the puzzle together. 

If we do not know what we are looking for, we don't end up finding anything. 

The last lesson from the trip was to define the success criteria at the outset. 

While trailing the birder who was deftly spotting and photographing birds, if we had defined our success criteria as being able to spot as many birds as he does or as quickly as him, we would not have accomplished anything since the landscape is so dynamic - a bird sits on a tree for not more than a few seconds. 

Hence very quickly, we reframed our success criteria - we were there to learn now what he spots but how he spots them. My focus shifted from watching the birds to watching him and his reflexes and later questioning him about how he recognizes bird calls or differentiates one type of eagle from another from a distance. 

At the end of the research, very often there is a sense of overwhelm with all that one has heard and read. The overdose of information can almost create a sense of inertia in decision-making. At such times, the success criteria defined before one can start the journey act as beacons of light to help a weary traveller navigate one's way back home. 

Hope the next time you are out there people-watching or culture gazing some of these thoughts return to your mind and add to your meaning-making experience. 

Until next time, when I stumbled upon some more random dots that connect and unravel a constellation of thoughts.