Dad is right

My dad is a fan of Anthony Quinn. He has his reasons, no doubt, but I think he likes him because he reminds him of a dear one (in my family, we’re into the habit of matching famous actors to one of the members of our family – that’s how I got to assigning the looks of Mel Gibson to my nephew).

Thus, it was from my father that I learned recently that Anthony Quinn had played the role of a Romanian peasant. I went straight to IMDB to check. Ever since I learned that I do not know it all, I first go and check before contradicting him. And so I found that Anthony Quinn did play the role of a Romanian peasant in the movie The 25^th Hour, based on the novel of the same name by the writer C. Virgil Gheorghiu.

I searched it and saw it online. It is really a good movie, and the script is really good, too. The actors performed wonderfully and I can assure you that you won’t lose your time seeing it.

The movie impressed me from the beginning, I must say. It swirled me away with the Romanian music and the picture on the wall inside the house of one of our dear Romanian writers (Ion Creangă).

Johann Moritz, played by Anthony Quinn, is a Romanian peasant from Transylvania. In 1939, Johann is denounced as Jew and is sent to a Romanian concentration camp. Then, mistakenly, he is enrolled in the SS army and appears on the covers of German magazines and books. Brought at Nuremberg trials for war crimes, Johann is acquitted due to a letter written by his wife, Suzanna.

Another interesting character is the writer Traian Koruga. Here below is an excerpt of a moving dialogue between Traian and Johann:

‘I do not want to see anymore, I’ve seen enough.’

‘But, Traian, there are so many good things to look at’.

‘I’ve looked at the sky, sea, mountains, and men… Men who think, but so many mad men!’

The final scene of the movie, the one with the smile, is by far the most staggering. ‘C’mon, you can do better than this’, says a photographer trying to encourage Johann to smile at the time of his encounter with his lost family. That encouragement to give a ‘big smile’ made me think of the question asked by the old ladies at the end of the ‘Silent wedding’ movie by Horațiu Mălăele: ‘What else do you want to take from us?’.

Smile as torture, that’s what this scene made me think of.

So please do watch this movie. My father recommends. And so do I.

The importance of a communications plan

(Photo credit: Trey Gibson - unsplash.com)

Effective communication occurs when the message is understood as the sender intended to.

This is a sentence I read somewhere, and it stuck with me, mostly because I consider it to be true.

Practice makes perfect, and it is in practice that I developed my organizing skills. And I do think that no improvement can be seen without making sure things are well organized. That applies, too, in communications. Those who think that storytelling is the only skill needed for efficient communication are terribly wrong.

The need of a plan is far more necessary in communications, in making sure the message is received and understood as intended.

Main reasons why you need a communications plan:

•         To have your goals and objectives clear as daylight.

•         To establish audiences, messages, channels, activities, and materials.

•         To clarify roles of the communications team.

•         To have a better understanding of your resources and to be able to plan ahead for those you’ll be needing on the way.

•         To consider possible obstacles and emergency scenarios.

An important thing to know about a communications plan is that it evolves. It is drafted when the goals of the company are set, but it may suffer changes and it should do so. Keep in mind how the COVID-2019 pandemic changed how companies function. We all had to adapt on the way. Nobody knew how to respond to the crisis, but we adapted to the challenge.

Personally, I think each company must have a yearly communications plan. Preferably, drafted at the start of the year and updated according to the needs that may occur during the unfolding of the year. A communications plan will never include all possible happenings throughout a year, but it will highlight main challenges and activities to be considered.

When drafting a communications plan, it would be useful to use the template of the year before and to insert what other wishes/ changes the management would want seen in the coming year. This sounds easier read than done, but with the right people and all the necessary information it can be achieved. 

Ode to the Romanian Language

 

I will not start this article leading with the Romanian word ‘dor’ (translated into English as longing) that seems not to have quite the exact equivalent in other languages. I was lucky that this life taught me that there are more angles to a geometric figure than meets the eye, and I can no longer accept the idea that ‘is either black or white/ you are with us or against us’.

Every language has its own features that can hardly be put into another one. And I think we should be OK with that. Why do we desperately cling to the idea that we should translate everything? Sure, the meaning is important. And those loyal to it understand the Sisyphus task that is to translate a text.

But thinking about the Romanian language, another thing comes to mind than words difficult to translate. In my opinion, there are other things mostly impossible to transmit, for example the sensation one has when uttering a word. It is thus very understandable that Proust wrote about madeleines (My God, the frustration that they cast upon me during so many French lessons! And here am I, referring to them. What was that saying about karma?!). How could one put into words the smell of something one loves?

And how to accurately narrate the way the mind races back to the past and hugs words like pie, hot pepper, cantaloupe, acacia flower, plow, modelling clay, bon-bon, blotting paper, ink pot, fringe, windmill? All of these can be translated into other languages; some of them easily. But the smell, the taste, that sensation of closeness to them cannot be transposed into words.

It seems to me that there is a certain connection one has to one’s mother tongue. A connection that cannot sometimes be even put into the words of that language. And all we got is this: to cherish the abundancy of that language and to honor its contents.