How to say "No" ?

Fortunately, I still haven't stained my relation with my boss. If not actually, but I have atleast succeeded in making her believe that I am not slacking out. We had this inconvenient but convincingly presumable conversation today about "Indians dunno how to nod their head to say a No?" It so happened that I didn't grasp a point that she made in our last meeting. She was probably frustrated but politely put it across to me that I still nod the head the same way, for a yes and a no. At that very moment, I just couldn't realise where the mistake was and I nodded again. She smiled,"You are doing it again!".


After coming back to my desk, I gave a pretty serious thought about it and shared this comment with A and S. Both of them laughed out loud. Apparently S's dad faces this problem with his Indian clients and the consequence of which results in a disastrous conclusion that "Indians have a tendency to promise things that can't be delivered". After this quick comment, S tried his best to convince me that,(in action) if you move your head up and down, it symbolically means a "Yes", but left and right movement means a "No". A was laughing even louder watching this. S points at me and asked me to nod my head to say a "No". I tried to be as natural and as instinctive as possible and nodded my head. It took me a while to figure out that I was in no-man's land. I soon,started laughing at myself. The other day when A, S and me went to a talk by a guy from Cornell about Adaptive finite element meshing(God knows what it is !! ), which although none of us understood even a bit of it and even after knowing that for some unknown reasons, I kept nodding at the talk as if I would get up and say,"I exactly knew what you are talking about". S, sitting right next to me, quickly scribbled something on a piece of paper and passed it on to me which said, "Stop nodding your head, I know that you don't get it." I had to literally control my stomach from busting out into the biggest laughter I could ever imagine.

Indians have a strange way of dealing things. I am not very proud of it, but am a part of it anyways.For a long while, our childhood education had groomed around the aspect of giving respect to the elderly. In some wierd sense, the inner conscience knows that nodding the head to say a 'No' is like being disrespectful. So, we are almost never taught how to nod our heads to say a 'No'. Its probably high time to learn this simple rule in life which makes your communication with peers and supers simple, elegant but very effective. If you don't understand/accept/agree upon something, its absolutely alright to say 'No, I don't get it' by not only saying it aloud, but also nodding your head from left to right. End of the day, its probably not the best of the ways but a lesson well learnt.