On language and usage of appropriate words

Words have always intrigued me, and i have been fortunate enough to have always been blessed by the gift of naturally stumbling upon the most appropriate words, since my school days. Since those times, i have won the love of my english teachers by writing poetry, including at one time, the teacher herself being the central character of a poem, which she absolutely adored and the poem clearly established the fundamental superiority of me and my friend/co-author in 9th standard over all our peers, in regards to our command of the english language.

This then continued even to IIT, where I wrote SOPs in my first year itself, for my batchmates, applying for the position of hostel representatives. But i truly became aware of my skills with the mighty pen, when I had the first heartbreak of my life in Jan 2007, and my emotions would pour not from my eyes but though the pen. I started a blog and published poetry arising out of heart ache, can’t really say the blog got popular, what did happen certainly, was,

a. it got vehement appreciation from the few friends who read it and

b. i was almost surprised that i had written stuff that i felt so good about or rather really liked, and i wasn’t someone who had scarce exposure to good literature.

May be that poetry even got me interest from the other few women who came to know of my blog, but then i can’t really say that with certainty now.

During that very period, i.e.. early 2007, i was selected to represent India and my college, at Harvard University for a conference on urban planning and sustainable development, where the selection committee, consisting of various Deans of IITD, liked the essay I had written on the topic. And from then on, there were multiple conferences in the next few years, across the globe, on themes largely concerning global warming and sustainable development, where i was invited and sponsored to speak, wherein in all of these, the selection process primarily involved the written expression of one’s views about the topic and possible solutions to the problems of global warming.

In the last year of my graduation, I spent good amount of time helping my batchmates write their CVs and SOPs, and there’s a case in particular where i remember, i helped a friend write an essay for securing an hefty scholarship (around 1100 Euros a month or so for 2 years) from the embassy of france for his masters in management from a very renowned institute in Paris.

And since, then, some close friends who i was offered the opportunity to help, and i willingly accepted, were able to secure

a. a seat to pursue PhD in MIT

b. the other was able to get in the number 3 Management school in France at an absolutely shitty GMAT score, a score which was atleast 100 points lesser than the average of all his peers.

And then even very recently, while i was running FranklyMe, i was able to help a very close college friend, make sense of all the hilarious decisions of his life (which i had witnessed very closely) and weave them together in a pattern which looked nothing less than a professional career rendition of a mozart’s symphony, and that too a rendition not for a generic management course but for a super specialised masters program from a very prestigious New York school.

I have my doubts regarding my ability to write poetry now, especially when considering the thorough lack of inspiration in my life in the past 6–7 years, (barring the last few months, where my heart has skipped a beat or two for different women), but what has certainly remained consistent has been my ability to communicate my rational thoughts very clearly in written word.

And this ability of and love for clear and concise expression, has really helped me introspect and understand my very own self in a manner i hardly could have ever imagined, and when a man uses writing for a purpose as noble and sacred as self critique and self understanding, he is bound to land in a place where the choice of his words, affect his thoughts and not just the other way round. And so, the usage of appropriate words became very very important for me, for I could hardly afford the folly of using a less than appropriate word and let it pollute a thought/understanding which i had reached to after much pondering and analysis.

So, now the journey of self understanding, was giving birth to the journey of the usage of most appropriate words in daily life.

And the first milestone, was a very very recent one, no more than 3–4 months back, where i realised that “Wrong” is a very useless word, it clearly expresses no clear/unambigious meaning or feeling. For, there is fundamentally nothing wrong in this world. Things, ideas /phenomenon can be truthful or untruthful or lets say factually correct or factually incorrect, and then they may be appropriate or inappropriate for a moment/context/conversation (for various reasons), and one may even agree or disagree with them but say that an idea or a sentence is wrong, hardly coneys anything clearly.

Consider:

the earth revolves around the sun: now this sentence/proposition can either be factually correct or incorrect; it may well be an inappropriate thing to mention while confessing your love to a woman, while it may be a very appropriate starting point for a class explaining the phenomenon of the occurrence of seasons; and if one were living in the middle ages in Christian europe, one would more likely disagree with it; but i find it very inapppropriate to say that it is wrong. And if I were the pope belonging to the middle ages, i might express my emotion by saying, please don’t say this blasphemous thing, but to say its wrong would be akin to saying absolutely nothing of meaning.

And the day I realised this, i was very happy and i resolved to never use this meaningless word again. But it was only 3–4 months later, while i was talking to a close friend, who is extremely pedantic when it comes to the usage of appropriate words, corrected me about 5 times in a span of less than 30 minutes for the usage of the word “right”. And it was then that i was made aware of this very interesting observation, that i while had consciously let go of the usage of “wrong” from my vocabulary, i had still been using “right”, the better half of “wrong”, an equally meaningless word. Which can again be replaced by any combination or singular usage of, factually correct, appropriate and agreement.

Invoking the sun and the earth to elucidate the point again,

the earth revolves around the sun; and it can be factually correct; someone may even find it to be an appropriate thing to say and someone else may even agree to it; but who would guess, what the person who replied “it is right” meant, wether that person is referring to its factual state, its relevancy/appropriateness in the present moment or his/her agreement on the statement is extremely unclear. So, the point being, just as wrong is an extremely unclear word, so is right.

And the poetic me, who is now making a comeback, in these wonderfully colourful times of my life, then compared the distances between the inseparable and conjugal right and wrong, to the distances between two humans, especially those who are very compatible and are in love with each other. And i wondered, if right and wrong can be 4 months apart in my own vocabulary, then consider, how apart and hence different would two humans be, who were never naturally conjugal, always apart from each other for years and lifetimes, and brought together coincidentally only for a short period of time.

And what i could conclude out of it was, may be if we could reduce our expectations of how understanding/similar do we want our partners, in personal, social, professional lives to be, it will be so much easier for us to appreciate the beauty of the relations we presently have with them, instead of focusing on the harmony we miss with them.

I analysed later that, my bias for stamping things/ideas to be “right”, to be the conclusive authority on their appropriateness, acceptability and truthfulness, prevented me from naturally throwing this meaningless word from my vocabulary and in the very same manner, we as humans build umpteen biases for various situations/things in our lifetimes and those biases are naturally so fundamentally different and diverse from those of any other person, and this, if we can truly accept and believe to be the default case in the relation between any 2 humans, the world will look much a much simpler/easier place to navigate.