What Eight Years in India Taught Me About Communication

How do you make yourself understood by someone who does not share a single one of your assumptions? I thought I knew the answer before I moved to India. Eight years later, I knew I had understood almost nothing, and that not-knowing turned out to be the most useful thing I have ever learned about communication.

I arrived, as many people do, quietly confident that clear was clear. Say what you mean, say it plainly,, yes? Not always.

The small lessons begin

The lessons were often small and slightly humbling. A sentence I thought was perfectly direct would land sideways, because it leaned on an assumption so deep in me I had never noticed it was there. My sense of what was polite, what was funny, what counted as getting to the point, what a yes actually meant, all of it turned out to be local, learned, and far from universal. I had mistaken my own culture’s habits for the plain facts of communication. Living somewhere else pried my fingers off that idea, one assumption at a time.

The first real shift was learning to write and speak for the reader in front of me rather than the reader in my head. My imagined reader shared my background, my humour, my shorthand. The actual person did not, and no amount of clarity in my terms could bridge that if I was not willing to move towards theirs. Good communication started to feel less like transmitting cleanly and more like translating, even when we were nominally speaking the same language.

Learning patience with the unknown

The second shift was patience with what I did not know. Early on I would fill silences and smooth over confusions, eager to keep things moving. Over time I learned that the confusion was information. When something did not land, it was showing me exactly where my assumptions and theirs diverged, and that was precisely the place worth slowing down. The misunderstanding was not an obstacle to the communication. It often was the communication, telling me where the real work lay.

The third shift, and maybe the deepest, was humility about who gets to be the default. It is very easy, coming from certain places, to carry an unexamined sense that your way of doing things is the neutral one and everyone else’s is the variation. India cured me of that, gently and thoroughly. I was the variation there. I was the one who had to learn the local grammar of courtesy and meaning. Being on that side of it, being the one who did not automatically make sense, is an education you cannot get from a book. It rewires your sense of whose comfort a message should be built around.

Applying these lessons professionally

I carry all of this directly into the work I do now. When I help an organisation communicate, the first question is rarely what do we want to say. It is who is actually going to read this, and what do they bring to it that we do not share? What feels obvious to the people writing that will not be obvious to the people reading? Where are the buried assumptions that could send a well-meant message sideways? These are India questions, learned the long way.

There is a temptation, in a connected world, to imagine that communication is converging, that we all increasingly share the same references and can dispense with the careful translation. My experience says the opposite. The more widely a message travels, the more assumptions it is likely to trip over, and the more it needs a writer who has felt the ground shift beneath their own certainties at least once.

A nudge to understand your audience

So the gentle nudge I would offer is this. Whatever you are trying to say, spend real time with the person who is not you, the reader who does not share your shorthand. Assume less than feels natural. Treat their confusion as a gift that shows you where to look. You do not need to move to another country to learn this, though it certainly helped me. You only need to accept, genuinely, that clear is not clear until it has landed with someone who is not already you.