Saturday afternoon. At the neighbourhood mall with family.
Just passing time, at peace with things, soaking in the buzz around me. The
state of contentment suddenly vaporized as I happened to make eye contact with
a chap in a blue shirt. He was beginning to break out into a smile of
recognition even as I realized that another mini crisis had just announced
itself at the door. My brain was sending me high voltage alerts signaling that
a known face was approaching but it was damned if it could feed me the name
that goes with the face…
Happens to you too? You place a face but not the name? Or
vice versa? Or neither!
The other day, I was waiting in the airport security check Q.
The Q goes up then you make a U-turn and you go down, then you make another
U-turn and you go up and so on. During the first pass, as I went up in one
direction a familiar face that was going down the other broke into a huge grin
and reached out for a handshake. And as you can guess, I’m blank.
How do you deal with the embarrassment that comes with
failed memory? It appears almost rude, not to mention the feeling that you’ve
let down the person at a very fundamental level. A vacuous look in the eye with
eyebrows raised questioningly could easily lead to one of your friends becoming
unfriended. On the other hand, a bluff remark runs the risk of an extended
conversation, over exposure and being found out. A very trying situation.
Over time, I have perfected a nice blend of a semi-friendly
smile along with a pre-occupied look. You don’t want to look blank, but equally
you don’t want to appear too friendly and recollect later that this was the guy
that shafted you during the internal audit fifteen years ago and then doing a
slow burn over it. At this point, my usual strategy is to take recourse to the
mobile phone. This is where I whip it out and whisper to the Familiar Face “Sorry,
incoming call – just give me a sec…”, and start rambling to nobody on the other
end. You just need to buy some time till the Face moves on and you buy yourself
a couple of minutes before the next pass. Valuable minutes, when you can cajole
the brain into doing some quick work at the till.
Frantic jogging of memory. Is this a face from college? An ex-colleague? Family? The brain is whirring but the
connection is elusive. By this time, my phone has been put on silent (in case
the damn thing rings as I pretend to be having a conversation). If memory continues
to play truant by the next pass, the imaginary phone conversation continues. An
apologetic look at the Face while continuously grunting into the phone is good
enough to buy myself another couple of minutes. And so on. Sometimes it comes
to you, sometimes it doesn’t.
In this case, it was made worse by the fact that the
Familiar Face is attached to a very tenacious individual who is now waiting for
me beyond the check in. Now I have to carry on a conversation with no clue as
to who the man is. The ultimate cruelty of fate is on display that day, as I
have colleagues with me and I’ll now have to do the introductions…
Maybe the manly thing to do would be to come clean and say
“And you are????”, but that would probably wound the person, so in trying to be
nice and mindful of their feelings, I usually set myself up for an extended
session of torture.
I’ve seen a few friends playing these moments a little more
aggressively. One of them has a fair amount of success with a simple line :
“Hey, not sure if I have your card, may have misplaced it – do you have one on
you?” It normally works, though not every time – once he was hit with “I am
your mother’s cousin, why do you want my card?”
Another friend has a different approach. “So, who else have
you met recently?” This is a pretty good one. Network effect. Some mutual
friend or acquaintance or cousin or colleague is going to come up, aiding the
frozen mass in the skull to come up with some linkages.
What complicates things is the matter of increasingly
convoluted names these days. I actually think earlier generations had it easy.
At least on the name front it was simple to wing it - between Rahul, Gupta,
Banerjee and Suresh, we would have covered 75% of India’s population in the
past. Nowadays, parents’ creativity is usually manifested during the
christening of their offspring with names like Andaleeb and Lalantika and the
like, with scant consideration to those of the human race that may chance to
get acquainted with their loved ones.
Also, with an ageing - not that aged actually – let’s say,
with a middle ageing network comes other complications. You don’t see someone
for a few years and bang – the hair is all gone! Or has become fully grey. Or
has become black again, with a full head of hair. And this propensity nowadays to
experiment with facial hair frequently leads to further brain overload. No
wonder one gets the feeling that the odds are stacked against us.
I have perplexed over the reasons for this failure to connect things in time. Some people moot the theory that memory becomes suspect
as we age. What rot! If anything, as we grey, so do our grey cells. And the
grey cells were grey to begin with, so any further greying should only help
matters. No, the answer lies elsewhere.
I recently read somewhere that the maximum number of people that
an individual can maintain a cognitive relationship with is 150. Hell, I wish I
knew that earlier. When I started my Linkedin account, I was quite in awe of
all the guys who had a hundred or even two hundred contacts. Through sheer
persistence, I recorded my moment of joy some months back, when I reached the
500+ Club. Similarly with Facebook. And there is the prolific family with
zillions of distant relatives. Not to mention all the places that I’ve studied
in, worked at, people I’ve met casually, and the numbers just keep stacking up.
Without realizing it, at some point I crossed critical mass and went beyond the
point of redemption.
There is some hope though - I think the younger generation is
showing the path. Everyone below the age of 30 is Dude. For ages between 30 and
50, they go with the more flexible Chief – which, depending on the tone can
cover a wide swathe across peers, friends and superiors. For all else, they use
the more universal Sir. Who needs to remember all these names?
Anyway, where do I go from here? I’m not a big fan of
mnemonics. It sounds too much like work. I can’t unwind the network. What’s
done is done. As I see it, the only solution is to alter my appearance so
dramatically that only people who know me really well would be able to
recognize me and the chances that I would recognize such people is also
proportionately high. So the next time you see a clean shaven, tonsured, dark
glass sporting guy attired in fluorescent orange baggy pants who looks vaguely
familiar, do come over and say Hi. But don’t feel too offended if I give you a
semi-friendly smile accompanied by a pre-occupied look and whip out my mobile.
Not your bad – it’s my memory playing truant once again…
***
