Code and Decode Sunday 08th, June 2014 / 19:22 Written by
By Lakshmi Kothaneth -lkairwaves@gmail.com -
WE might think branding is a millennium need. Looking into history makes you think otherwise.
The new media, digital media uses a lot of icons in communicating. It might have come about because of the need to be precise. We have Twitter that wants us to describe our thoughts in 140 characters. Many thought that would be impossible. Yet experience tells us not only did it succeed but it became a way of life for many.
In all digital technology there is a great amount of pictorial description that makes it easy to comprehend and children friendly as well. It is these drawings that help the younger ones operate smart phones with such great ease.
But let us come back to branding. The logos that came about to signify a product of a company did not come about during the industrial revolution as I had thought.
History had always fascinated me. And I envied anyone who could decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphs. They wrote to convey. So writing has always had an important place in civilisations.
I recently came across a review by Dr Shrinivas Tilak of a book written by Dr S Kalyanaraman called Philosophy of Symbolic Forms in Melluha Cipher. An authority on Indus Valley Civilisation, Dr Kalyanraman has also been trying to decipher the Indus Valley script.
Reading the review I realised the traders were the ones who really needed the communication skills. And for many reasons. Dr Shrinivas Tilak writes that, in his attempt to understand the Indus script, “Dr S Kalyanaraman proceeded with the assumption that a solution to the Indus script puzzle lay in the trade and commercial activities of the people of the Sarasvathi — Sindu civilisation.”
According to Dr Kalayanaraman the people then used the Indus writing system to record the details of their work. He also suggests they used a code and a code key known as rebus to transform and transfer information.
The trade associates could decipher it but others may not be able to decode it. Interesting, don’t you think? As the artisans began to export to faraway lands then the need for the stamps to brand their products came about as well.
We do all this even today. It seems humans love symbols and decoding codes.
We have symbols on the road all along communicating with us about the speed limit, yield, stop, slow and so on and at the same time we have passwords for our computers.
A ‘star’ on your inbox indicates an important mail, the trash can on your computer or smart phone is to delete. So in other words we are still holding onto our roots. The drawing was after all our elementary skills in communications.
The cave drawings in the world still talk to us about a group of people who lived and their lifestyle. The archaeologists are still uncovering artefacts world over and it is these symbols and scripts found on them that give us an idea of how far the traders and the products travelled.
They left a mark for us to decode. What we learn from it is the journey of human kind. We continue to leave mark. The difference is, in the past it took time for the civilisations to communicate, whereas today we do it instantly. We are globally brand conscious. Yet when we look at the map the trade routes are still very happening but in varying degrees and products. Those were the days of gems, metal and silk route, and these are the days of oil and gas.
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