Love Stuck By Dumb-Dumb Struck By Love

The following is a highly touching story of a dumb(mute) guy which has revolutionized an actual new technology that is being currently developed by somebody somewhere in one of those places called “LABS”

M☻ “Hello Manav Jain speaking”

M☻ “Yes Mini it’s me …..It’s Manav here”

m☺ “Listen mister if u think this is some joke then surely it is not a good one”

M☻ “Hey I am Manav, head of the TALKIE-2 group”

……….I don’t know if it was the M of MANAV or the trickle from the eye that came first , I couldn’t speak for the next minute, my eyes went half-shut and doors to old memories creaked open and one of my best memories came running down in front of my eyes. The 1^stone was about our group ‘Talkie-2’ (which had just 2 members me and Manav) , and yes Manav was the head he was the biggest chatterbox alive on the earth then………….. ……..

…………….. yes it was THEN and not NOW anymore. He lost his voice due to a acute throat infection. It was like my voice had also gone along with his and so eventually I was shifted to my grandma’s place in Guwahati and had no news of him except that he too moved from Delhi and got admission in a regular college of Pune and he attended sign language classes in the evening.

I missed our phonydays (his term for holidays) when we ( mostly he!) talked for hours on the phone. I simply loved those phonydays , I never found anyone else with whom I clicked so much nor did he ……………. I Bet.

M☻ “Are you a dumb why don’t you speak up?”

We heartily laughed after years and we went silent again. It was the first time we didn’t have anything to talk about …………….NO that was surely not the case actually we were both filled upto the pharynx but just couldn’t decide what to say first.

M☻ “I hate silence and don’t want it anymore”

all I could speak up was “HOW ?” and that gave him a start:

He told me about this SIGN TALK TECHNOLOGY (STT), how it converted images into speech using principles of computer vision and image processing.

I had meant to ask how was he in all these years.

So he began telling that how he lived in a constant fear of his mobile that the damned thing would ring. Though he kept one as insisted by his parents specially his mother. On picking up the phone the “Hello” sounded more like a interrogative question asking him to prove if he was there on the line and he responded by a clap or he made sounds with whatever, banging objects, he had in his vicinity. Slowly and slowly the talks on the phone became very specific curtailed to binary questions ( i.e those having answers in yes or no ,Yes meant one clap and No meant two ) like, did he go to class ? answer: one clap or ; when are his exams answer : 5 claps (5th of the month). He felt so pathetic sitting in a lone room clapping and making sounds just to answer a call, he never used his mobile in public. He never called me or for that reason to anyone coz how would he in the first place tell his identity that it was he, Manav, who was calling.

Talk, mobile, chit-chat all these words had become meaningless to him, to him MANAV –the most talkative guy in the school, it seemed to him as if he had already completed his quota of talking in the school.

I asked him didn’t the sign language help. He said the sign language is not a visual rendition of the oral language and so helped only in talking with others like him(mute) that too when they were face to face and there were only a handful of such people in a regular college like his. Though he said that the speed and fluency of communication of two people well versed with the sign language equaled that of two people talking in the normal oral language. Ya he was true I could feel it now talking with him it was no different then the olden times except that the voice was not his it was of a computerized narrator talking in a very indianised human tone, but the thing that mattered was that I was hearing the inner him, his views and thought’s that blended so perfectly with mine.

Then he told me about the darkest nights of his life that changed his future forever. One night at around 10:30 pm he was coming back to college on his bike when it hit a stone, lost its balance and got off the road. He was thrown into a ditch followed by the bike which smashed on his legs fracturing them. He got a feel that it would not be an easy night. He called home from his mobile his mother picked up and asked “Beta (son) ,is everything ok” ( coz he generally never called them)

He clapped twice. But then he realized that he was doing a mistake coz how could he possibly tell his parents Where and in What situation he was, that he had fallen in a ditch and his legs could not move and what was he expecting them to do instead of getting tensed up. Then his mother asked “Beta are you missing us, are you feeling lonely?” and he clapped …………….just once. His mother told him to keep faith in god and study wholeheartedly. Now again he was alone and felt all the more lonely and miserable. He could see people there at a distance but he lay there in a puddle of mud unable to catch their attention by any means. Then he did something that he should have done days before, he slammed his mobile that damned thing and broke it. It had only made him feel more and more pathetic and foolish that what was a person like him keeping a mobile for, it again and again taunted him that he was A dumb, A Dumb , A DUmb , A DUMb , A DUMB…

Oh why hadn’t the bike fallen on his head instead. He couldn’t cry any longer it was as though there were no more tears left to run down and wet his cheeks.

In the morning some local people came for his rescue and asked about his whereabouts, had he got his mobile he could have made them talk to his parents but the night’s misery made him take a resolve that he would never touch the damned thing called “MOBILE” unless……………………………………………………………………………………

I couldn’t hear anymore I was completely shaken on imagining his plight; I wanted to just hold him and give him a tight hug. I asked him as to where was he calling from: he told, he was calling from inside a library, standing in front of the “KEEP SILENCE” board. We both laughed and the heaviness of my heart drifted away.

Again we both were silent – imagining each others face and just staying with that image. Finally I asked him as to how was he able to call and talk so normally again, how was this happening? And BAM! he got another start:
M☻: “Oh! its very easy to call from a STT (Sign Talk Technology) enabled phone. First I choose a narrator >> Indian→northern (out of options of northeastern, central, western, southern and northern) and then …………simply press call.  The camera mode of the phone gets activated and starts taking pictures of my face and hand gestures. The color of these pictures is discarded and they get converted to basic outlines in black & white (thus immensely reducing the file size, suitable for a mobile phone processor).

Next the Image to Speech Converter draws inference from these outlined images and converts them to suitable words. Basically all the major words and letters in our daily oral language (eg: English) have a corresponding Sign (represented by particular position and orientation of handshapes) in the Sign language. And there is a Sign to word dictionary installed in the phone; luckily I can add newer personal Signs to the dictionary. For example when I press call it takes a picture of my face converts it into broader outline and this outline has been associated with the word “Manav Jain” and this is how you hear “Hello Manav Jain speaking”; similarly when I make a tiny gesture by the fore finger and the thumb you hear “Mini”.

Sorry you must have got bogged down by all the technicalities, let me tell you some interesting facts. All these years, being mute, I have become like a detached observer of my surroundings, of people. I realized that that I was not the only kind of dumb person, basically there were three kinds of dumb people:

1. Physically dumb or mute people
2. People who have a hard time expressing themselves, the number of hand gestures used by them far exceeds the number of actual words they speak, they always need someone to fill in for them.
3. And most common are the Situational Dumb: – People who are rendered shut due to their surroundings.
   1. People at places with the “Keep Silence” alert! eg: temples, libraries, hospitals, military missions, class rooms, theatres, offices etc.
   2. People at places where sound is all that you’ve got eg: busy marketplaces, rock concerts, riots, military missions, traffic-jams etc…
   3. And lastly the Corner Talkers: People who can’t talk if there are another pair of ears nearby, you’ll find them talking on their mobiles facing a corner, in the remotest part of the room.

But here comes STT (a technology devised basically for the dumb) for their rescue and it has found such immense use that soon every phone will be STT enabled. People have developed their very own personal signs for day to day common things, making the experience of using the mobile a very personal one.

Boys and girls in colleges can be seen with earphones plugged in and sitting in backbenches and talking away in PSL (personalized sign language) as they call it, with no one getting a hint of what they talk. Having your own PSL has become a new way to establish one’s cool.

People who initially had to go out of their offices or theatres to attend calls which only required a yes or no from them, like “When will you come back” ( they now tell time from their fingers, for :am they show their palms and for :pm they show the back of their hands , along with the required number of fingers) or like “Would you like to have spinach or gobhi” ( one finger for “1st” and two for “2nd”) or like “Papa I am going for playing, completed all the homework” ( a thumb sign for “ok”) . Nowadays movie theatres have changed their signs to “please switch off your mobiles if they are not STT enabled”.

In military combats when soldiers are in the enemy camp and have to report on the number of terrorists, using a walkie-talkie to speak puts them in danger of being overheard, detected and fired at; but not reporting back to their sergeant puts them in danger of their own sergeant firing them on return. But now the military too uses these STT enabled mobiles and have developed their own specific signs which can be used by their spies to report in a very silent manner.

A few days ago some Mr. Singh called me and told me about how he was able to answer all calls from his relatives, sitting right next to his wife, who had recently delivered their baby, without disturbing them in their sleep. He told everyone that the operation was a success (by showing the thumb sign for “ok”) and that he had become a father to a boy (shown by giving a finger).So basically he sat there for hours showing the thumb and the finger to his relatives.

We both laughed, but then I asked him as to why did Mr. Singh call him and tell him all this, why him.

M☻ “Oh! Haven’t I told you yet that you are talking to Manav Jain Chief Innovator of Sign Talk Technology at Motorola research labs.
Yes Mini, that night of the accident, lying their in the dirt, after all my tears and all my thoughts had dried up – I had an epiphany - I realized that-I am the one who has this problem, who is living with it day in and day out. No one understands it better than me, and so NO ONE CAN MAKE A BETTER SOLUTION FOR IT THAN ME. I took a resolve of not touching the damned thing called “MOBILE” unless…….. I was able to use it to communicate with you, maa, dad all of you.  It was the feeling of sharing myself with you or instead just the very thought of you which kept me going day in and day out all these years to develop this technology.
M☻: I am still not sure, if this “me talking to you” is a dream or a reality?
m☺: I don’t know about you, but its surely a dream for me!

The above was my entry for Motorolas seamless mobility competition 06;it is purely a work of fiction. By:
Manuj Dhariwal
User Experience Designer
IIT Guwahati

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