Communication Skills: A Peep into the past

Communication is a bipolar/multi-polar phenomenon. Though all animate beings communicate, so to say, with their likes but the humans have been bestowed with effective and varied ways and means, both non-verbal and verbal as also proximate and distant, of conveying and receiving messages from each other.

The four identifiable sub-skills of verbal communication --- word based or language based --- are Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing (L S R W) in that natural order. For an individual to be equally proficient in all the four sub-skills would be a rare virtue, though that would remain highly desirable.

                                                                             **

The Pauranik Story about the sage Veda Vyasa and Lord Ganesh is well known in the Indian lore. It is beyond my capability to describe the colossus-es but a brief introduction of the two characters of the story, as relevant, may be in order. Lord Ganesha is the ultimate wisdom personified. With elephantine ears & memory he possesses an enormous ability to listen and digest the received knowledge. Also, with his two pairs of dexterous hands (signifying twice the maximum capacity of humans) Ganesha is able to re-produce the message verbatim in text with speed and efficacy. The Sage Veda Vyasa (all rolled into one) was a scholar, a thinker, a poet, an author and a communicator par excellence of all times.

                                                                               **

Once, the sage Vyasa approached the Lord Ganesha with a prayer that the latter helped the former in reducing to writing the entire corpus of sacred knowledge gained by him for the benefit of humanity for all times to come. By itself it was a huge communication project which was made all the more complex by the lord. While accepting the commitment, Shri Ganesha laid down a condition that once they sat down to work, he (Ganesha) would stop writing as soon as the sage stopped dictating. Lo and behold, the two fulfilled their parts of the contract to mutual satisfaction. The outcome was unimaginably profound and huge. But, that part of the story sometime later.

                                                                                  **

 How could that be done? While the Sage Veda Vyasa was adept in Reading (From his copious notes, perhaps) and Speaking(R & S), the Lord Ganesha had mastery over Listening and Writing (L & W)

                                                                               *****.