Musings on “Feedbacks”

PRELUDE :: Oxford Dictionary gives the meaning of the word synonym as “a word or phrase that means exactly or nearly the same as another in the same language”. Intuitively I also checked up the same in Webster’s Thesaurus which gives the synonym, related words, antonym and “near” antonym for so many words…..Alas….it gives none of these to the word synonym itself…..!! Is this what “taking things for granted” means !!!

Well, Let me start of my this week’s musings with a small incident that happened in one of the training sessions that I handled last year. I am a part time trainer at office and the more important thing is that I am passionate about it. Noticing that (some times) the Feedback forms are filled up quite superficially due to the hurry to leave, I take some time to explain the importance of “feedbacks” at the end of the session with a request to complete all the details as is required in the form. In this particular session, I found a team member leaving the last column (intended to capture the overall feedback about the session) blank while she handed over the form to me. I candidly requested her to fill it up too; she responded with a cheerful smile that she did not have “any comments” obviously meaning “negative feedback”. I patiently smiled at her and asked her to write it exactly and give back the form.

This little incident pushed me to deep thoughts and I was wondering the distortions that happen to the usage of words with wrong understanding formed about them. Like the word “Naatram” in Tamil which essentially means smell (YES, only “DhurNaatram” means Bad smell), based on the consistent wrong usage of many people around, the younger generation strongly believes that “Naatram” means bad smell!! Yes, this girl has clearly misconstrued the meaning of “comment” as some thing negative!

Now let me put forth my understanding on few related words in the same context – Opinion, Comments, Feedbacks and Suggestions. While all these four words involve thought process on the inputs through our sense organs, I feel there is some essential difference between the first two and the last two. While opinions and comments can be passed on to some body else too, the latter two words denote the communication to the feeder of our inputs. There is a clear dividing line here.

Opinions are formed within us (“abipraayam”) while Comments are expressed opinions (“Karuthu”). There is a possibility I may have a opinion on some subject but never pass comment about it. Honestly I do not find any other difference between these two words.
Between the other two words, Feedback is giving our comment to the right recipient “as is” while Suggestions is giving our comments on “how better”.

Forming an opinion is some thing that we always do when we are emotionally or sentimentally involved in any subject but we always have an option of the other three (C, F and S). While expressing, I feel the order above is quite perfect to indicate how much evolved we are. Mediocre people pass comments; Sensible people give Feedbacks while empathetic people offer suggestions for improvement. I do understand "giving suggestions" is not possible all the times – particularly when we do not have expertise about the subject matter; Giving feedbacks is by itself an art and needs a separate musings. But that does mean “comment” is superior to them any way……?

Now I want to conclude this musings with a question to ponder…Why don’t the BLOG world change the “comment” field as “feedback” field ? If not others, I would prefer to have this with this term as this is MY blog.

Well…. when I say, MY blog and MY body I mean them in the active present. I do realize that every thing that is created has an expiry date. For that matter, wise people always say that Death does not touch some one who is in constant memory of it.