One of these days I played Chinese Whispers with the kids. They learnt some new words and sentences and as the game moved on, they started forming their own sentences.
Moving forward, I thought I would give it a twist. I just asked them some simple questions:
- While every kid was trying his best to convey the correct message, what made the message distort?
- Everyone was blaming it on the other kid about the mistake that happened but no one was accepting the same for their own. And specially, no one did it on purpose. How did the mistake happen then?
After discussing these two questions for a bit, I twisted the game further:
I told them that once a word or sentence is passed from one kid to another, we will suppose that 10 years have passed. Doing this, when the word or sentence arrived in the end after completing full circle, it had already crossed centuries and it obviously got distorted.
I then asked them to tell me one single person who distorted it and they blamed it on each other but no one came up with a single name.
At last, I asked them, “Now what do you all think we must do in such situation? No one did a mistake on purpose but we still got the wrong message somehow. What did you learn from all this?”
After so much of thinking, one bright young thing sprung up and said:
“Sir agar koi bhi baat hume koi bole to aankh band karke uspar vishwaas nahi krna chahiye…”
I said, “Very good”. And after little more explanation, I dismissed them all.
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