Category: Miscellaneous

Poetry for the deaf

What is it like to be deaf?
People have asked me.
Deaf? Oh, hmmm, how do I explain that?
Simply, I can’t hear.
Nooo, it is much more than that.
It is similar to a goldfish in a bowl.
Always observing things going on.
People talking all the time.
It is being a man on his own island
Among foreigners.
Isolation is no stranger to me.
Relatives say hi and bye.
But I sit for five hours among them.
Talking great pleasure at amusing babies.

The peom continues here.

This post by Rujuta got me thinking about deafness in general, and sign language in particular. She attended a workshop centered around deaf people in Pune conducted by Avanti!!. Her post isfull of interesting tid-bits that make you think. What I found most thought provoking was how well-meaning efforts by others sometimes simply work to rub salt in the wounds. For example, did you know that the award-winning acting of Amitabh and Rani in Black was not really enjoyed by deaf people because they couldn’t really make out the sign language? Turns out Amitabh and Rani were pretty bad with sign language. Remember the “news for the deaf” on Doordarshan on Sunday afternoons? Here’s the inside scoop:

In India there are no television channels, which the deaf people can enjoy just like the hearing people. The only news channel that has news for deaf people once a week is the national Doordarshan channel. But that’s no good as apparently in that show they use sign language used by a small deaf community in Delhi and not the Indian sign language. So this news hour is just watched by hearing people, as deaf people spread across India don’t understand this sign language.

I have also been a little interested in Sign Language. About a month back, I bought a book on sign language – on a whim. I had an idea in mind that I’ll take it up as a hobby. I had recently learned that sign language is not just a simple matter of translating the words of your regular “hearing” language into gestures – it is much more interesting with its own rules. That sounded interesting to me.
Here is what wikipedia has to say about sign language:

Sign Language for “I love you”

In linguistic terms, sign languages are as rich and complex as any oral language, despite the common misconception that they are not “real languages”. Professional linguists have studied many sign languages and found them to have every linguistic component required to be classed as true languages.

[…]
Many unique linguistic features emerge from sign languages’ ability to produce meaning in different parts of the visual field simultaneously. For example, the recipient of a signed message can read meanings carried by the hands, the facial expression and the body posture in the same moment. This is in contrast to oral languages, where the sounds that comprise words are mostly sequential (tone being an exception).

A gesture made with the hands can mean quite different things if done with an angry expression as opposed to a smile. A gesture made with hands at the shoulder level of the speaker (technically “signer”) can mean something different from the same gesture made with the hands at the hip level. Fascinating stuff. But only when I started googling sign language for this blog post did I find that there is a large body of sign language poetry.

Exemplary for the mature status of sign languages is the growing body of sign language poetry, and other stage performances. The poetic mechanisms available to signing poets are not all available to a speaking poet. This offers new, exciting ways for poems to reach and move the audience.

Google for deaf poetry. You’ll be fascinated by the stuff you find.

If you are from Pune, you might be interested in this: Avanti!! will conduct classes on sign language starting in June. Contact avanti-pune@hotmail.com if you are interested.

How to make great powerpoint presentations

Marketing Guru Seth Godin has this insightful post on the right and the wrong way to make powerpoint presentations. The basic idea he espouses is that the powerpoint slides should be used to sell your idea emotionally. Don’t put facts and figures and numbers – that can go in the document that you leave behind.

Talking about pollution in Houston? Instead of giving me four bullet points of EPA data, why not read me the stats but show me a photo of a bunch of dead birds, some smog and even a diseased lung? This is cheating! It’s unfair! It works.

He goes on to give a bunch of DOs and DONTs which are worth thinking about. For example

Sound effects can be used a few times per presentation, but never use the sound effects that are built in to the program. Instead, rip sounds and music from CDs and leverage the Proustian effect this can have. If people start bouncing up and down to the Grateful Dead, you’ve kept them from falling asleep, and you’ve reminded them that this isn’t a typical meeting you’re running.

Read the whole post.

Seatbelts Save Lives

This blog post is a great article on why you should wear seat belts. Although the general idea is well known, this post goes into so much detail of what happens when you don’t wear a seat belt, that hopefully it will scare some more people into complying.

In a collision, you have three or four sub-collisions all taking place in sequence. First, the vehicle hits some object. The vehicle abruptly slows, but unrestrained objects inside it continue at the same speed, in the same direction. Then the unrestrained body hits the interior of the vehicle, and starts to slow. That’s the second collision. That body’s internal organs are still moving at speed until they hit the inside of the chest (or get cheese-sliced by their supporting ligaments—and that’s where you get things like bisected livers or aortas). The fourth collision is when the bowling ball you left on the rear deck hits you in the back of the head, because that continued at the same speed in the same direction. Newtonian physics: Learn it, live it, love it.

You definitely need to read the whole post. It goes on and on in this vein. If nothing else, it is very medically informative.

Over the years, on multiple occassions my friends or acquaintances have been involved in accidents were some of the occupants of the car were not wearing seatbelts and had very serious injuries (and in some cases, died). But people in the same accident who were wearing seatbelts walked off with minor injuries. I have myself driven my car head-on into an immovable object at 120kmph on the Pune-Bombay highway. My car suffered to the tune of 1 lakh rupees. I walked off without any injuries.

As the article points out, in many places, wearing a seatbelt is now required by law. Non-compliance is punishable by a small fine in some cases, and in other cases, death.

(I found the article from this Boing-boing post.)