Forgetting ..

While at School I remember having studied an essay titled “forgetting”. I don’t exactly recall its contents, but I do remember that it was a funny article generally poking fun at the very common human fallacy. Forgetting the content and remembering the title is acceptable when the topic in question is a grade 8 English essay. On similar lines but disconcertingly, I seem to be remembering only the titles of many other things learned in school/college for which the content is more important. Examples, Bernoulli s principle, Laplace transforms, Doppler Effect and so on. But on the other hand I can tell you the dates of the school trip to a hill station, the name of my class teacher in grade 1, and that a friend of mine had this strange sentiment of wearing the same clothes on all the examination days. On paper this looks like a problem, of remembering the trivial and seemingly unimportant, while forgetting all those theorems and principles. But is it..? Don’t we all remember things closer to our heart than those closer to our brains?

I think this trait is common to many people. While I can remember the number of Oscars Lord of the Rings won, I don’t remember when the deadline for the assignment I am working on now is. The other day I saw a friend of mine forgetting her insurance papers which are a must to obtain the visa to go abroad for the company sponsored training session, while she had no trouble in remembering what another colleague’s favorite word was … yes of all things... favorite word...

The other day my roommate forgot the house keys and stepped out. The door has an automatic lock and our friend was there trapped outside the flat and I was hundreds of miles away on a holiday. The only other person to have the keys, the landlord, stayed a good hour or so away. So he had to trudge all the way there and collect the keys. The travel is not the issue, but the “how can you be so stupid” stare from the landlord can kill you. I am saying this with confidence because I received one such stare for the same reason many months back. But, my roommate can in his sleep run through the starting line up of Real Madrid, Man U and maybe Galatasaray and Dynamo Kiev also for good measure.

I am sure many among us would have had similar experiences, how many times would you have struck your hand on your forehead and said “Damn! I forgot to submit that assignment / forgot to return the book to the library/ forgot to call up a best buddy on his birthday (yeah, the buddy would be a guy, if it’s a girl, the guy may not forget) “.

And how many times would one have prided himself for remembering among other things the names of all the girls across all the years who studied… nah ….shared the campus while one was in college, the clinching answer that helped your team win the inter college competition, the number of runs Sachin scored in the world cup, the first movie with your girlfriend and so on..

I am not going to delve deep and analyze this for I have already told that people remember things closer to their hearts than to their brains and also I have blissfully forgotten all the basics of psychology that I learnt in first year B-school..