I forgot to remember...

A few years ago in a stand-up comedy show a satirist was saying that when you are 21 people say ‘You have BECOME 21’. Then they say ‘You have TURNED 30’… then ‘you are PUSHING 40’… later ‘you have REACHED 50’… and then ‘you have MADE it to 60’.

My God! You can see that it takes a lot of effort to age… from BECOMING to MAKING it. But I believed that old age happens...with little or no effort on our part. Not to be so. The only thing that I am worried about is it should not mark the onset of a serious disease, like Alzheimer’s or dementia… this fear lurks in the back of my brain.

I remember that my dad had illusions some five years back because of his medicines. He was seven or eight years into his Parkinsons’ by that time and he used to see a swimming pool in the balcony of my neighbour and a few kitten always playing around him. I don’t mind having illusions… if it could be of the sort, Miss World is next to me in the bed or I am driving a Porsche.

Last month I had been to an Upanayanam (sacred thread ceremony), and in the dining hall met a young lady who waved at me. I didn’t remember her name, but could remember her face as being familiar. Yet it seemed she knew me well. Uh oh, I’m forgetting names. Instead of pretending, that I already know who she was, and saying “Oh! Hey... how’ve you been?” I was like saying in an uncouth manner “Oh, sorry I don’t remember you.” She in an assuaging tone told me who she is (I realised that she is my wife’s sister-in-law’s aunt’s daughter-in-law – in short a family friend Mr Ramanathan’s daughter-in-law and I had been to their home many times). This face and name forgetting has been happening only the last one year or so. It is as though I have done an emergency landing in China and all the faces are same and all the names are similar sounding.

Many a time, I have actually pretended to remember someone and acted like I have never forgotten the name. I claim to possess photographic memory… but blurred and under developed. The conversation on get together occasions used to go like this…

“Hey, man. How are you?” or “What’s up dude! Long time.” And then wait to see whether he is going to remember my name or not. I avoid any type of conversation that would include his name, and just wait for the name to just end up being mentioned by someone else.  Or pretend and say, ‘Hey, so yeah man.. how do you spell your name again?’…as though, there are so many different spellings for a single name.

Or else I usually ask for their CURRENT number (as though I hold on to some archaic number of theirs!) and have that immediately input into my phone and check whether the phone lists it as already stored under the name _______! Sometimes when someone is there with me, I will do the one-sided introduction… “Hey this is my wife Lakshmi” expecting the anonymous person to introduce himself by uttering his name. This is all fine if you remember the face and don’t know the name. But if you cannot recall the face itself? It is one thing to forget the name and it’s another thing to forget the face. The difference can be stated thus: it is one thing to forget where you put your glasses, and it’s quite another to forget that you wear glasses in the first place. I have some techniques for recalling faces too. When I first get introduced to people, I will refer to them mentally as “the guy with the ‘bonda’ nose”, “the chick with huge hips”, “the guy with droopy eyelids” etc.

Ok. What causes this memory impairment? I believe it has to do with the hippocampus, a part of the brain responsible for memory and navigation.  The brain deletes what it considers clutter—especially if that particular memory hasn’t been used in a while. But now, this doesn’t explain why I’ve still retained such trivial rubbish as the entire jingle of “Washing Powder Nirma”—a TV commercial I haven’t seen in more than 20 years. But someone who I met yesterday needs to get re-introduced! Short term memory loss vs. Long term memory retention, I suppose!

People only use 10 percent of their brainpower and we need less and less memory every day, though there is an information explosion in the recent times. We have 100 times the information but we have 1,000 times the links to find the information. All you need to remember is Google’s URL. Heck, you don’t even have to remember that — your computer will. Computer memory is growing exponentially. But every year, my RESIDUAL AVAILABLE Memory (RAM) gets smaller and smaller. How about making a backup copy of one’s brain… after all, knowledge may improve over time, but memory does not. And when I am on the topic of computers and technology I need to mention this… all those passwords and PIN numbers we have to memorize nowadays. I don’t know why we can’t assign a simple password like MURALIGANESH… why should it have some special character and some numeric as well? Why can’t the PIN number for all my six credit cards be simply my permanent age, say 25?!

We all know the negatives about forgetting, but believe it or not, there are some positives. For one thing, every day you meet new faces and there is nothing like a familiar old face… how exciting it is! Another plus to memory loss is that if you accidentally get a glimpse of yourself in the mirror, you might for a split-second think, ‘who's this that's come to visit me’? So in a way, it is like you always have new company. There are other good things too. I visit my neighbours more often… thinking that’s where I live, but they don’t know that!

The age-old joke about signs of growing old… first you forget names, second you forget faces, then you forget to zip up, and finally you forget to zip down. I am happy that I have not crossed the second stage. And most importantly I would like to die while I can still remember who I am :-)