Photos Speak Louder Than Words…Until They Become A Noisy Marketplace!

Kato’s photos showed that averages mean nothing if the variations are huge. One bad roller, one dusty corner, one ignored detail could ruin the whole system, observes S. Murugan

It was 7 o’clock on a weekday evening in 1992. The mill looked like it had just auditioned for a “Cleanest Workplace of the Year” award.

Most of the staff had already gone home after working two extra hours, probably dreaming of dinner while secretly cursing the upcoming inspection.

For seven straight days, we had scrubbed, polished and buffed every corner of the mill until it gleamed like a Bollywood movie set on account of the visit of Kato-san, the Technical Director from Japan. His company had started trading yarn with us, and this was his first visit. Naturally, we wanted him to see perfection (or at least the illusion of it!?).

I did my final inspection like a proud headmaster before annual day. The blow-room sparkled, the spinning hall shone, and even the humidification system seemed to hum in approval.

“Ah, flawless!” I thought, patting myself mentally on the back.

The next morning, at exactly 9:00 AM (because Japanese punctuality is sharper than a samurai sword), Kato arrived.

I greeted him with a warm smile. “Welcome, Mr Kato!”

He bowed, smiled politely, and spoke in broken English.

“Hi! Herro! (hello)…yes…. Sank you! (Thank you)”.

I was surprised a little with his English and started to wonder if technical discussions were even possible with that English. Unfortunately, no one from our team knew Japanese language!

For three days, he wandered around the mill like a detective in a silent movie. He didn’t talk much. The conversations felt like playing charades. He’d wave his hands, point at machines, and mumble half-words. He used all categories of gestures like iconic, metaphoric, deictic, etc., in communicating with us.

We honestly thought he was…well, dumb! His questions were so basic that we wondered if he even understood spinning technology.

Inside the departments, most of the time he snapped photos with his Canon camera.

Every time he clicked a photo and left that place, our technical staff would sprint to the spot like Olympic athletes, convinced he had discovered a crime scene. But, except one or two reasons like some fibres along with dust and fluff wrapped around the arbour of the top roller, they could not find anything else.

On the final day, Kato walked into the meeting room with the grim face of a man who had just discovered our secrets. Gone was the friendly tourist look; this was now Inspector Kato.

Another Japanese gentleman joined him—our translator. And then, the show began.

Kato pulled out his developed photos. One by one, he displayed them like courtroom evidence. The translator spoke in simple English, but honestly, the photos did all the talking.

– Flats with embedded fluff and seed coats at the carding.

– Improper setting of top rollers between top arms at spinning and simplex.

– Missing spacers, different colour of spacer at spinning.

– Broken front zone condenser at simplex machine.

– Split slivers at the creel of the simplex machine.

– Damaged sliver coils. (It seemed the operator has flipped the last layers of the sliver of previous cans while feeding a new can of sliver.)

– Cut marks on the cots (probably due to knife which was used to remove lappings.)

– Cops lying under the ring frames.

…The image list lasted as long as a two-hour movie.

It was like watching a horror movie where the villain was…our own negligence!

We sat there, sweating, realizing that our week-long cleaning marathon had been nothing but an eye-wash. The photos stripped away our illusions and exposed the truth.

Suddenly, I realized: he wasn’t dumb at all. His silence and broken English had fooled us. But his photos revealed something deeper — variations in quality and maintenance.

We had been obsessed with achieving good average values in production reports. But Kato’s photos showed that averages mean nothing if the variations are huge. One bad roller, one dusty corner, one ignored detail could ruin the whole system.

The Lesson: Visuals Beat Words Every Time
We apologized, of course.

Kato didn’t need fancy English or technical jargon—his photos had already spoken a thousand words.

From that day onwards, our maintenance culture changed forever. Because unlike seminar speeches that fade after a week, those photos were burnt into our brains. Every time we saw a machine, we remembered Kato’s Canon camera silently judging us.

Photo culture in the Digital Camera & WhatsApp Era
Years later, digital cameras and mobile phones arrived. Suddenly, everyone became “Inspector Kato.” Photos flew around on WhatsApp groups faster than yarn through a spindle.

But instead of helping us improve, this new photo culture created noise.

We started complaining about each other instead of fixing problems. The photos spoke louder, yes — but louder like a noisy marketplace, not like Kato’s silent wisdom.

Finally, the noise decreased when we requested the persons who were just posting the photos to write solutions for the issues depicted in the photos.

Moral of the Story
* Poor communication doesn’t mean poor intelligence.

* A camera can expose more than a thousand words.

* Variations matter more than averages.

* In the digital age, moderation is the best — because too many photos without solutions just create noise.