I don’t think anyone would argue that communication has got easier over the years.  When I was a child, we didn’t have a phone of any sort.  Supposing you knew someone who did, you could walk to a red telephone box, put in your money, dial their number and if they answered, press button A to speak.  If they did not answer your call, you pressed button B to get your money back.

To make a long distance ‘trunk’ call, you dialled O for the operator, he or she told you the correct money to insert and put you through to your contact.  If your money ran out during the call, pips would sound to alert you to insert more cash.  I do not need to tell you how it all works now unless you’ve been a hermit for 40 years or are still fighting a war in the jungle.

Talking of the jungle, I’m there at the moment.  Surprisingly, we can pick up intermittent Wi-Fi on our boat in Assam, north-east India.  The animals, however, have no such luxury and the tiger is messaging other tigers by marking his territory in the traditional way.  If the one-horned rhinoceros behaves like his African cousins, he will post messages by defecating in a midden and stirring it up for the next passing rhino to smell.  This communication by smell is ‘olfaction’ and is a bit like using Facebook and contains messages about the health, status, seniority and mating potential of the poster.

In our modern day written communication, we are often casual in our use of language and a couple of experiences in India prompted me to think about words and the messages they carry.  In the Taj hotel in Kolkata, we booked a table at the Wykiki restaurant for dinner the following evening.  When we arrived, we were shown to a booth marked ‘promised’.  There’s something quite personal and intimate in that word which infers a personal commitment of the user and outshines the usual notice, ‘reserved’, which begs the interpretation, ‘keep off’ or ‘you can’t occupy this space’.

On a passing passenger train, one carriage was signed ‘for differently abled’, a positive spin on our use of ‘disabled’.

The Indians seem to be good at replacing our words with others which are much more thought provoking.  In one of our lectures about the ‘Mighty Brahmaputra’ river, our host, Nazir, explained how the floodwaters eat into the mainland riverbanks, threatening and sometimes destroying property and changing the channels of the river by leaving behind island sandbanks.  Some of the population find opportunity in this, living a nomadic lifestyle and making their homes on these new ‘islands’.  Here, they grow crops on the fertile land until they are forced to abandon their disposable dwellings and move on by further movements of the river.  These are the pros and cons’, hazards and benefits of living next to a massive watercourse which wends its way for 2880 kilometres from Tibet, through India and Bangladesh before meeting the Ganges and pouring into the Bay of Bengal.  But Nazir used a word for these opportunities that has a higher meaning and one which we might dwell on occasionally – ‘Blessings’.  So for them this is not just an opportunity, an advantage or even a silver lining.  In the midst of the chaos caused by the river, the people are ‘blessed’ with grace or divine will and receive this spontaneous, if temporary, gift of nature with grateful hands.