This is perhaps the busiest season of the year for me. I am not just teaching two sections of the core course, which is tough enough for an aged, low productivity fellow like me. I am also coordinator for the course across all six sections.
Without boring you with further details about my academic life I should just say this: It is that time for the year when apart from eat, pray and work, I should be doing nothing else. May be a wee bit of sleep would be alright.
Yet I am here, writing this post about an absolutely inane matter. Or something should appear inane on the face of it. But I write about it because it is more than just inane.
My lessons in understanding the different kinds of emojis and the emotions that they convey is about my desperate attempt to keep up with recently acquired young friends - may be just acquaintances as they see the relationship - who are about the age of my sons or a bit older.
That does not give you the full picture unless I tell you that Lakshmi and I were blessed with twins such a long time after we were married that our sons are nearly as old as our grandchildren would have been if we had had managed to bring forth children at the average age that educated, Indian, middle class couples are supposed to bear children.
My need for a 101 on emojis was made imperative by my attempt to stay in touch on whatsapp with these kids that I referred to. I shall refrain from revealing more about these kids out of respect for their privacy.
My acharya on the subject was my seventeen year old nephew (my sister in law's son) who is a bit of an odd genius. Odd because he does not have any of the off-putting irritating qualities of a genius. He has many of the other hallmarks though, apart from a razor sharp acumen and a broad range of talents across, sports, arts, letters and the sciences. He is absent minded, leaves stuff around, can stay without food for extended periods of time and then when he gets going, he resembles a ravenous wolf. And so on.
Over a twenty minute session he explained to me that there are two sets of emojis each conveying the same sets of emotions. One of them is typically used by people who are well over the hill, to use a telling idiom, while the others are used by the more happening age group that my nephew belongs to. If I wanted to be cool he advised that I should use the latter.
His true genius was in full flow when he demoed me the visual effects of why each of those emojis stood for they what they are supposed to. By the time he was done I did not have to make any leap of faith to accept what he said. That, to my mind, is the hallmark of a great teacher - transcending the teacher-student distance to make the student see sense and reason in what the teacher is saying.
So these cool emojis which were mere odd, minimalist combinations of straight lines, dots and and small arcs and semi circles, conveyed an imaginable range of emotions that only the highest of nature's creatures - homo sapiens - is capable of harbouring, not to speak of displaying them: Various shades of anger, frustration, sadness, happiness, smugness, romantic moods, even vulgarity of various kinds.
The one that took the cake of course is one that is meant to express a human emotion that I was not aware of, which brought out the young man's pedagogic talent in full measure. He said that it conveyed a mood of indifference that could be expressed by a sound that resembled that of the half hearted bleat of a goat that did not want to be left alone. To make sure I got the essence he said it might be spelt as "mehh"!
And then he went on to say that the more brightly coloured golden yellow, although meant for the less cool older fellows like me, can present an even wider range of thoughts and ideas. There is one that shows lips that are sealed by zips, there are images of lips so red and so full that could be used to convey romance so full blooded romance that you would wonder if it was February 14th already and so on.
At that point that this was as much as a 101 could cover and promised to deliver in a more advanced lesson in his next visit if he was satisfied with the progress made by his new, near-hexagenarian disciple.
As I reflected on my young mentor's lessons, I realised that since I went to college the world of communications seemed to have progressed a great deal, well beyond the semaphores that we learned about. It seems to have borrowed heavily from the world of hieroglyphics that one only read about in the context of the Sumerian and Indus Valley civilisations.
Nanni....Namaskaarams...
Without boring you with further details about my academic life I should just say this: It is that time for the year when apart from eat, pray and work, I should be doing nothing else. May be a wee bit of sleep would be alright.
Yet I am here, writing this post about an absolutely inane matter. Or something should appear inane on the face of it. But I write about it because it is more than just inane.
My lessons in understanding the different kinds of emojis and the emotions that they convey is about my desperate attempt to keep up with recently acquired young friends - may be just acquaintances as they see the relationship - who are about the age of my sons or a bit older.
That does not give you the full picture unless I tell you that Lakshmi and I were blessed with twins such a long time after we were married that our sons are nearly as old as our grandchildren would have been if we had had managed to bring forth children at the average age that educated, Indian, middle class couples are supposed to bear children.
My need for a 101 on emojis was made imperative by my attempt to stay in touch on whatsapp with these kids that I referred to. I shall refrain from revealing more about these kids out of respect for their privacy.
My acharya on the subject was my seventeen year old nephew (my sister in law's son) who is a bit of an odd genius. Odd because he does not have any of the off-putting irritating qualities of a genius. He has many of the other hallmarks though, apart from a razor sharp acumen and a broad range of talents across, sports, arts, letters and the sciences. He is absent minded, leaves stuff around, can stay without food for extended periods of time and then when he gets going, he resembles a ravenous wolf. And so on.
Over a twenty minute session he explained to me that there are two sets of emojis each conveying the same sets of emotions. One of them is typically used by people who are well over the hill, to use a telling idiom, while the others are used by the more happening age group that my nephew belongs to. If I wanted to be cool he advised that I should use the latter.
His true genius was in full flow when he demoed me the visual effects of why each of those emojis stood for they what they are supposed to. By the time he was done I did not have to make any leap of faith to accept what he said. That, to my mind, is the hallmark of a great teacher - transcending the teacher-student distance to make the student see sense and reason in what the teacher is saying.
So these cool emojis which were mere odd, minimalist combinations of straight lines, dots and and small arcs and semi circles, conveyed an imaginable range of emotions that only the highest of nature's creatures - homo sapiens - is capable of harbouring, not to speak of displaying them: Various shades of anger, frustration, sadness, happiness, smugness, romantic moods, even vulgarity of various kinds.
The one that took the cake of course is one that is meant to express a human emotion that I was not aware of, which brought out the young man's pedagogic talent in full measure. He said that it conveyed a mood of indifference that could be expressed by a sound that resembled that of the half hearted bleat of a goat that did not want to be left alone. To make sure I got the essence he said it might be spelt as "mehh"!
And then he went on to say that the more brightly coloured golden yellow, although meant for the less cool older fellows like me, can present an even wider range of thoughts and ideas. There is one that shows lips that are sealed by zips, there are images of lips so red and so full that could be used to convey romance so full blooded romance that you would wonder if it was February 14th already and so on.
At that point that this was as much as a 101 could cover and promised to deliver in a more advanced lesson in his next visit if he was satisfied with the progress made by his new, near-hexagenarian disciple.
As I reflected on my young mentor's lessons, I realised that since I went to college the world of communications seemed to have progressed a great deal, well beyond the semaphores that we learned about. It seems to have borrowed heavily from the world of hieroglyphics that one only read about in the context of the Sumerian and Indus Valley civilisations.
Nanni....Namaskaarams...
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