I did my schooling from Montfort School, Roorkee. Currently, I'm pursuing my Bachelors in Computer Science from UPES, Dehradun.

I have many strengths and weaknesses, but being frightened isn't one of them.

At the end, I just want to say, "Life goes on, with you or without you."

The session made the difference between listening and hearing very clear to me. Although I was aware of this difference earlier, but with appropriate examples, it was more clear. Majorly, hearing is involuntary i.e, we hear everything around us, whether we are paying attention to it or not. it is a physiological process. also, as ma'am was explaining  the about active and passive listening and gave suitable examples, I realized how could I use this in my future conversations and how did I talk to various people and when I was listening to someone, did I listen actively or passively... or whether while listening, did it seem like I wasn't listening... as and when the session went on, I learned about what should I do to make my listening skills better so that the communication gets better. As we got to discuss about the barriers to communication in our breakout groups, I was so amazed because automatically the ideas we discussed by reference from our past communication experience, it was so relatable and true. and I realized that while communicating, we do not pay attention to these factors, neither the speaker, nor the one who is listening. if we do so, we can definitely have a better communication.  

I even realized that, in future, if I would be having an important communication where I need to listen and understand properly, I would definitely try to implement the para-phrasing technique used by therapists in order to understand better and avoid any kind of misinterpretation.  also, even though i did not know the technical name for this, but i have used it many times. 

For example, in my maths class in school, when I did not understand a particular question or was not sure if what i understood was correct, i asked my teacher by telling what i understood, and ended by asking if this was correct.

For example, i went to Dominos the other day, and i noticed that while taking orders, they always repeat the order to make sure if what they heard was correct, so as to ensure a good communication with no misunderstandings.

For example, while watching the famous TV show "Kaun Banega Crorepati", Amitabh Bacchan asks the contestants many times if they want to lock their choices. It is because there should be no chance of miscommunication.

Hearing is a physiological process. It is involuntary, unintentional and therefore effortless as  concentration is not required. Also, it is not wrong to say that while hearing, we use only one our ears.

Common examples that depict hearing can be, while we are taking online classes, we hear many sounds like, sound of cooking in the kitchen, people talking in the house and everything happening around us. Another example could be that, if we go for a picnic at a public place, we can hear everything happening in our surrounding, like, I can remember I went to India Gate for a picnic with my family, and there were many people around us, doing something, calling someone , playing , a child crying, vendors selling those toys, the conversation going on at the ice cream stall, I could hear birds chirping  and many more sounds. At that time, I did not make an effort to listen what was happening around, but randomly heard it. And to my surprise, I remembered it now, when I was thinking about an example about the same. or even if we notice, at a railway station, we generally do not listen to any other sound except for the announcements. We just hear random sounds of the things going on around us. Another example could be, nowadays in shopping malls, restaurants and other places, background music can be heard. 

PASSIVE LISTENING- If we are in a class and are listening to what the teacher is teaching, as and when she looks at us, we nod our head to make her understand that we have understood what she want's to say. If we are watching a youtube video, we do not give the feedback or raise questions, but gain information, that can also be considered as passive listening. Listening to songs can come under passive listening.

ACTIVE LISTENING - When in a debate, we tend to listen attentively and respond, that can come under active listening. Counselling sessions involve active listening where the therapists listen to their patients very keenly and use para phrasing so that there is no miscommunication. 

Researchers who study cultures around the world have identified certain characteristics that define a culture. These characteristics are expressed in different ways, but they tend to be present in nearly all cultures: rites of initiation, common history and traditions, values and principles ,purpose and mission, symbols, boundaries, and status indicators, rituals, language.

Source: https://www.businessmanagementideas.com/communication/cross-cultural-communication/3299

Cross-cultural communication tries to bring together such relatively unrelated areas as cultural anthropology and established areas of communication. Its core is to establish and understand how people from different cultures communicate with each other. Its charge is to also produce some guidelines with which people from different cultures can better communicate with each other.  Cross cultural communication can be divided into two categories. first being, the things we can observe. for example, rituals, clothes and food. the second category is the ones which we cannot visibly see. for example beliefs, values, thoughts and perceptions. 

In this topic, i learnt how important is our way of asking questions to others who are of a different culture. If we want to communicate in a better way with any person, we need to be aware of their culture. Awareness comes from understanding, observing, questioning, and researching  about the other person's culture. It is very important for me to have good cross cultural communication skills because when i will get a job, it would probably be a multi- cultural workspace so this work help me to work in an efficient manner. I learnt that we should agree to disagree. we should have mutual respect for each other's culture and beliefs. Good observation skills are a must for cross cultural communication. As I went through this topic in detail, I felt that, till now, whatever I have been taught week wise, contributes in one way or the other to make this cross cultural communication better.

for example, if I don't know something about any culture and I want to know about it, I need to use a combination of those five voice branding elements when I will ask the other person to explain about his/her culture. and if I use them right, the other person would not misunderstand or misinterpret my sense of asking and would be comfortable in telling me about it. Secondly, when the person is telling me about his/her culture, I need good active listening skills so that I can listen and interpret correctly. I must also use para-phrasing to ensure what i have understood is correct or not. 

Image credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:NicP/gallery

This sign is known all over the world and consists of the tips of your thumb and index finger touching each other to form a circle and your other three fingers pointing straight up in the air.

In most Western countries, this gesture is a very positive one and means “All is good/okay”. It can also be used as a question, again to ask “is everything okay?”. Alternatively, the gesture can have a neutral meaning, for example to mean the number zero, as in France.

When used in the Middle East, though, it has a very negative connotation, as it indicates the evil eye and is often accompanied with cursing.

 

The film is based on the autobiography of Wladyslaw Szpilman, who was playing Chopin on a Warsaw radio station when the first German bombs fell. Szpilman's family was prosperous and seemingly secure, and his immediate reaction was, "I'm not going anywhere." We watch as the Nazi noose tightens. His family takes heart from reports that England and France have declared war; surely the Nazis will soon be defeated and life will return to normal.

It does not. The city's Jews are forced to give up their possessions and move to the Warsaw ghetto, and there is a somber shot of a brick wall being built to enclose it. A Jewish police force is formed to enforce Nazi regulations, and Szpilman is offered a place on it; he refuses, but a good friend, who joins, later saves his life by taking him off a train bound for the death camps. Then the movie tells the long and incredible story of how Szpilman survived the war by hiding in Warsaw, with help from the Polish resistance.

Szpilman is played in the film by Adrien Brody, who is more gaunt and resourceless than in Ken Loach's "Bread And Roses" (2000), where he played a cocky Los Angeles union organizer. We sense that his Szpilman is a man who came early and seriously to music, knows he is good, and has a certain aloofness to life around him. More than once we hear him reassuring others that everything will turn out all right; this faith is based not on information or even optimism, but essentially on his belief that, for anyone who plays the piano as well as he does, it must.

Polanski himself is a Holocaust survivor, saved at one point when his father pushed him through the barbed wire of a camp. He wandered Krakow and Warsaw, a frightened child, cared for by the kindness of strangers. His own survival (and that of his father) are in a sense as random as Szpilman's, which is perhaps why he was attracted to this story. Steven Spielberg tried to enlist him to direct "Schindler's List," but he refused, perhaps because Schindler's story involved a man who deliberately set out to frustrate the Holocaust, while from personal experience Polanski knew that fate and chance played an inexplicable role in most survivals.

The film was shot in Poland (where he had not worked since his first feature film, "Knife in the Water," in 1962), and also in Prague and in a German studio. On giant sets he recreates a street overlooked by the apartment where Szpilman is hidden by sympathizers; from his high window the pianist can see the walls of the ghetto, and make inferences about the war, based on the comings and goings at the hospital across the street. Szpilman is safe enough here for a time, but hungry, lonely, sick and afraid, and then a bomb falls and he discovers with terror that the running water no longer works. By now it is near the end of the war and the city lies in ruins; he finds some rooms standing in the rubble, ironically containing a piano that he dare not play.

The closing scenes of the movie involve Szpilman's confrontation with a German captain named Wilm Hosenfeld (Thomas Kretschmann), who finds his hiding place by accident. I will not describe what happens, but will observe that Polanski's direction of this scene, his use of pause and nuance, is masterful.

Some reviews of "The Pianist" have found it too detached, lacking urgency. Perhaps that impassive quality reflects what Polanski wants to say. Almost all of the Jews involved in the Holocaust were killed, so all of the survivor stories misrepresent the actual event by supplying an atypical ending. Often their buried message is that by courage and daring, these heroes saved themselves. Well, yes, some did, but most did not and--here is the crucial point--most could not. In this respect Tim Blake Nelson's "The Grey Zone" (2001) is tougher and more honest, by showing Jews trapped within a Nazi system that removed the possibility of moral choice.

By showing Szpilman as a survivor but not a fighter or a hero--as a man who does all he can to save himself, but would have died without enormous good luck and the kindness of a few non-Jews--Polanski is reflecting, I believe, his own deepest feelings: that he survived, but need not have, and that his mother died and left a wound that had never healed.

After the war, we learn, Szpilman remained in Warsaw and worked all of his life as a pianist. His autobiography was published soon after the war, but was suppressed by Communist authorities because it did not hew to the party line (some Jews were flawed and a German was kind). Republished in the 1990s, it caught Polanski's attention and resulted in this film, which refuses to turn Szpilman's survival into a triumph and records it primarily as the story of a witness who was there, saw, and remembers.

The screenplay by Eric Roth has the complexity of modern fiction, not the formulas of modern movies. Its hero, played by Tom Hanks, is a thoroughly decent man with an IQ of 75, who manages between the 1950s and the 1980s to become involved in every major event in American history. And he survives them all with only honesty and niceness as his shields.

And yet this is not a heartwarming story about a mentally retarded man. That cubbyhole is much too small and limiting for Forrest Gump. The movie is more of a meditation on our times, as seen through the eyes of a man who lacks cynicism and takes things for exactly what they are. Watch him carefully and you will understand why some people are criticized for being "too clever by half." Forrest is clever by just exactly enough.

Tom Hanks may be the only actor who could have played the role.

I can't think of anyone else as Gump, after seeing how Hanks makes him into a person so dignified, so straight-ahead. The performance is a breathtaking balancing act between comedy and sadness, in a story rich in big laughs and quiet truths.

Forrest is born to an Alabama boardinghouse owner (Sally Field) who tries to correct his posture by making him wear braces, but who never criticizes his mind. When Forrest is called "stupid," his mother tells him, "Stupid is as stupid does," and Forrest turns out to be incapable of doing anything less than profound. Also, when the braces finally fall from his legs, it turns out he can run like the wind.

That's how he gets a college football scholarship, in a life story that eventually becomes a running gag about his good luck. Gump the football hero becomes Gump the Medal of Honor winner in Vietnam, and then Gump the Ping-Pong champion, Gump the shrimp boat captain, Gump the millionaire stockholder (he gets shares in a new "fruit company" named Apple Computer), and Gump the man who runs across America and then retraces his steps.

It could be argued that with his IQ of 75 Forrest does not quite understand everything that happens to him. Not so. He understands everything he needs to know, and the rest, the movie suggests, is just surplus. He even understands everything that's important about love, although Jenny, the girl he falls in love with in grade school and never falls out of love with, tells him, "Forrest, you don't know what love is." She is a stripper by that time.

The movie is ingenious in taking Forrest on his tour of recent American history. The director, Robert Zemeckis, is experienced with the magic that special effects can do (his credits include the "Back To The Future" movies and "Who Framed Roger Rabbit"), and here he uses computerized visual legerdemain to place Gump in historic situations with actual people.

Forrest stands next to the schoolhouse door with George Wallace, he teaches Elvis how to swivel his hips, he visits the White House three times, he's on the Dick Cavett show with John Lennon, and in a sequence that will have you rubbing your eyes with its realism, he addresses a Vietnam-era peace rally on the Mall in Washington. Special effects are also used in creating the character of Forrest's Vietnam friend Lt. Dan (Gary Sinise), a Ron Kovic type who quite convincingly loses his legs.

Using carefully selected TV clips and dubbed voices, Zemeckis is able to create some hilarious moments, as when LBJ examines the wound in what Forrest describes as "my butt-ox." And the biggest laugh in the movie comes after Nixon inquires where Forrest is staying in Washington, and then recommends the Watergate. (That's not the laugh, just the setup.) As Forrest's life becomes a guided tour of straight-arrow America, Jenny (played by Robin Wright) goes on a parallel tour of the counterculture. She goes to California, of course, and drops out, tunes in, and turns on. She's into psychedelics and flower power, antiwar rallies and love-ins, drugs and needles. Eventually it becomes clear that between them Forrest and Jenny have covered all of the landmarks of our recent cultural history, and the accommodation they arrive at in the end is like a dream of reconciliation for our society. What a magical movie.

Here is a man who saw his chance at the beginning of World War II and moved to Nazi-occupied Poland to open a factory and employ Jews at starvation wages. His goal was to become a millionaire. By the end of the war, he had risked his life and spent his fortune to save those Jews and had defrauded the Nazis for months with a munitions factory that never produced a single usable shell.

Why did he change? What happened to turn him from a victimizer into a humanitarian? It is to the great credit of Steven Spielberg that his film "Schindler's List" does not even attempt to answer that question. Any possible answer would be too simple, an insult to the mystery of Schindler's life. The Holocaust was a vast evil engine set whirling by racism and madness. Schindler outsmarted it, in his own little corner of the war, but he seems to have had no plan, to have improvised out of impulses that remained unclear even to himself. In this movie, the best he has ever made, Spielberg treats the fact of the Holocaust and the miracle of Schindler's feat without the easy formulas of fiction.

The movie is 184 minutes long, and like all great movies, it seems too short. It begins with Schindler (Liam Neeson), a tall, strong man with an intimidating physical presence. He dresses expensively and frequents nightclubs, buying caviar and champagne for Nazi officers and their girls, and he likes to get his picture taken with the top brass. He wears a Nazi party emblem proudly in his buttonhole. He has impeccable black market contacts, and he's able to find nylons, cigarettes, brandy: He is the right man to know. The authorities are happy to help him open a factory to build enameled cooking utensils that army kitchens can use. He is happy to hire Jews because their wages are lower, and Schindler will get richer that way.

Schindler's genius is in bribing, scheming, conning. He knows nothing about running a factory and finds Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), a Jewish accountant, to handle that side of things. Stern moves through the streets of Krakow, hiring Jews for Schindler.

Because the factory is a protected war industry, a job there may guarantee longer life.

The relationship between Schindler and Stern is developed by Spielberg with enormous subtlety. At the beginning of the war, Schindler wants only to make money, and at the end he wants only to save "his" Jews. We know that Stern understands this. But there is no moment when Schindler and Stern bluntly state what is happening, perhaps because to say certain things aloud could result in death.

This subtlety is Spielberg's strength all through the film. His screenplay, by Steven Zaillian, based on the novel by Thomas Keneally, isn't based on contrived melodrama. Instead, Spielberg relies on a series of incidents, seen clearly and without artificial manipulation, and by witnessing those incidents we understand what little can be known about Schindler and his scheme.

We also see the Holocaust in a vivid and terrible way. Spielberg gives us a Nazi prison camp commandant named Goeth (Ralph Fiennes) who is a study in the stupidity of evil. From the veran da of his "villa," overlooking the prison yard, he shoots Jews for target practice. (Schindler is able to talk him out of this custom with an appeal to his vanity so obvious it is almost an insult.) Goeth is one of those weak hypocrites who upholds an ideal but makes himself an exception to it; he preaches the death of the Jews, and then chooses a pretty one named Helen Hirsch (Embeth Davidtz) to be his maid and falls in love with her. He does not find it monstrous that her people are being exterminated, and she is spared on his affectionate whim. He sees his personal needs as more important than right or wrong, life or death. Studying him, we realize that Nazism depended on people able to think like Jeffrey Dahmer.

Shooting in black and white on many of the actual locations of the events in the story (including Schindler's original factory and even the gates of Auschwitz), Spielberg shows Schindler dealing with the madness of the Nazi system. He bribes, he wheedles, he bluffs, he escapes discovery by the skin of his teeth. In the movie's most audacious sequence, when a trainload of his employees is mistakenly routed to Auschwitz, he walks into the death camp himself and brazenly talks the authorities out of their victims, snatching them from death and putting them back on the train to his factory.

What is most amazing about this film is how completely Spielberg serves his story. The movie is brilliantly acted, written, directed and seen. Individual scenes are masterpieces of art direction, cinematography, special effects, crowd control. Yet Spielberg, the stylist whose films often have gloried in shots we are intended to notice and remember, disappears into his work. Neeson, Kingsley and the other actors are devoid of acting flourishes. There is a single-mindedness to the enterprise that is awesome.

At the end of the film, there is a sequence of overwhelming emotional impact, involving the actual people who were saved by Schindler. We learn that "Schindler's Jews" and their descendants today number about 6,000 and that the Jewish population of Poland is 4,000. The obvious lesson would seem to be that Schindler did more than a whole nation to spare its Jews. That would be too simple. The film's message is that one man did something, while in the face of the Holocaust others were paralyzed. Perhaps it took a Schindler, enigmatic and reckless, without a plan, heedless of risk, a con man, to do what he did. No rational man with a sensible plan would have gotten as far.

The French author Flaubert once wrote that he disliked Uncle Tom's Cabin because the author was constantly preaching against slavery. "Does one have to make observations about slavery?" he asked. "Depict it; that's enough." And then he added, "An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere." That would describe Spielberg, the author of this film. He depicts the evil of the Holocaust, and he tells an incredible story of how it was robbed of some of its intended victims. He does so without the tricks of his trade, the directorial and dramatic contrivances that would inspire the usual melodramatic payoffs. Spielberg is not visible in this film. But his restraint and passion are present in every shot.