Just becareful when conveying message - "Camel" or "Kumar"?

We have talked about the importance of communicating and relating messages. As many of us know, the probability of a message getting lost is rather high when it is conveyed from one person to another and then to a string of other people. There is a popular game called “Chinese Whisper” where a message (normally it will be a paragraph of words) is shown to one of the participants without the knowledge of the other participants. The first participant then conveys the message to the next and then the next person will convey to the next person and so on. By the time the message reaches the last participant, the last person would be asked to reveal what was the message. Most of the time, the message revealed by the last person would be significantly different from the actual message. This game prove to me two things. One, message can be interpreted differently by different people. This is due to most of us having selective hearing. We only hear what we want to hear or what we think is important, the rest of the message will be ignored. Secondly, by interpreting and giving a different meaning to the message, this indirectly create what is known as “rumour”. We all know that “rumour” tends to spread like wildfire especially if it involves scandals or matters that will start our tongues wagging! Therefore, it is important to get the message correct and to reveal it as a whole rather than selectively.

Yesterday, I was watching a documentary on television which involved a few American explorers in India. In that episode, one of the American explorers was asked by an Indian person to seek a guy by the name of “Kumar” who lives in the town. This American explorer then proceeded to inform one of his colleagues that they needed to look for a guy name “Komahl”. Then that colleague informed another one of the explorers that they needed to look for “Kamal”. By the time, the message was conveyed to the last American explorer, they were all looking for a person by the name of “Camel”! The last American explorer then remarked, “Who or what are we actually looking for? A camel or a person?” I was sitting on the sofa and laughing my head off as this is a perfect example of “Chinese Whisper” where message gets lost rather easily! So whenever someone should ask you to convey a message to another person, just remember the “camel” episode and make sure you take down every single word. Have a good day, everyone!