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LOUDER THAN WORDS Words and Images Vineet Dhall
Do our body parts come at a price? Well, let's negotiate. Negotiation and bargaining is an art form. Every art form has its distinct mediums and tools. Alternatively, can these tools be our body parts? This article highlights a bargaining form existing in the fruit market of Delhi, India, where a distinct non-verbal style of negotiating the price, commonly known as the Azadpuri style, takes shape.
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Human hands can paint Sistine Chapel, pluck a bass guitar, manoeuvre surgical instruments, forge metal, type this essay, pull out the Excalibur, or strike the pose of the thinker. They can grasp, hold, poke, give you the middle finger, evaluate, mould and hold the world around us. They are extremely expressive assets, can sign for the deaf, read for the blind, help to tell a story, or reveal our innermost thoughts. No other species has appendages with such remarkable capabilities. It is an involuntary non-verbal communication and an important sponge for cues in what we call 'the body language'. Handshakes can be our first form of dog butt-sniffing (getting an essence of things); it may seem trivial but can leave a lasting negative impression if you get it wrong. Get it right, and you can score some good brownie points. But this synchrony is perceived differently all across the globe. During the current pandemic, it also mutated into an elbow shake. But much before the current pandemonium, stories from 2003 reported that the US troops in Iraq were greeted or acknowledged by the locals with a 'thumbs up'. Was this an act of disrespect, or simply the middle eastern way of offering westerners support? HOWEVER, the US defence institute reported that the middle east has widespread western influence, and, after the Gulf War, this was their way to show support. But the gestures are not really universal throughout. Even in the West, the use of the thumbs up is not universal. Scuba divers use it to say that 'I'm going up'. But our gestures and their adaptations are complex. Some attribute it to decisions on life and death in gladiatorial battles. Nevertheless, It seems that the use of the thumb has survived more than spoken languages. From life and death to 'everything is okay', we can see how meaning might not survive over time. Toby Maguire also demonstrated how hand gestures and the right combination could lead to web-slinging from hands. Keeping that aside, a handshake is a prominent form of agreement. 'It's a deal', a contract, a decision of sorts. In the deep forests of concrete labyrinths of Delhi, one can
