If you are a bit like I am – and in this respect, I think
you are – you have probably classified yourself in humanity’s ‘Most Forgetful’
category. It happens to me all the time:
I am standing in some queue or the other or in the reception of a company and a
fellow walks up, all 32 teeth on display, puts his hand out and says, ‘Hi Gopa,
how are you?’. As you see him walking
your way, you know this is going to happen; its too late to run or pull out
your self-defence weapon – a newspaper to hide behind – and, when he begins to
speak, the only question on the otherwise-vacuous mind is ‘What the hell is his
name?’ Actually, there is a second question: ‘Where did I see this fellow?’,
which gets answered immediately with his ‘It was good to be in your session
last week’ or some such thing.
Now, after years of such trauma, I have perfected my
response and, when you have read this piece, you will acknowledge, with
trembling folded hands and grateful, weeping eyes, that I have done my good deed for the day.
Here’s the trick. I
have stopped trying to guess his (or, worse, her) name and instead focus on
which part of India he comes from. If he
is from TamBram land, you can begin your reply in basic Tamil (much of which is
picked up at the Chennai Railway Station) and now choose from the following
four names that are most likely: Venky, Subbu, Anand or Karthik. If, like me, you can make out a Mallu from a
mile, use the second ‘Rule of 4’, if you think he is a Syrian Christian (which is about one-third of the population in Kerala, but one-sixteenth of the population of any software company). His surname will end, I assure you, in one of the GMAT code – George, Mathew, Abraham or Thomas. Feel free to choose from these and combine in
any way, for instance, Abraham Mathew or George Thomas. If your gut tells you this is not the name,
start speaking in Malayalam. When I do
so, most Mallus excuse themselves, for they recognise torture when they hear it.
If you recognise a trademark Bengali swagger, you are saved much
of this process by simply addressing him as ‘Babumushai’, which was pretty much
Rajesh Khanna’s only contribution to making our lives simpler. For the rest of India, you can use Hindi with
ease and, if the other person does not know Hindi and says so, remember to
continue with even more difficult Hindi until he recognises some profanity and slinks away in shame.
I am not yet done. If
you are in the premises of a software company, there is a mean trick you can
use, and it works all the time. After a
couple of initial sentences, draw his attention away to something on the wall –
even if it is the ubiquitous clock showing the time in Monrovia – and then
sneak a look at his prisoner’s identification tag, which companies impose on
their people. If you meet in a queue,
say in a passport office, at an ATM or in a department store, take out your
mobile, manufacture an apologetic smile and mention that your phone is in the
silent mode, and pretend to take a call, which can go on until he makes an
apologetic smile in return and moves away.
I am still not done.
If the other person is in his teens or twenties, you can guess his name
to be Aditya, or the female to be Aditi.
Most people in the sub-continent are now called one of these two names
and it is a tendency that must be strongly encouraged using social media, flash
mobs and Satyamev Jayate. Imagine the
ease of meeting someone like this and confidently shaking hands with a “So, how
are you, Aditya?’ In fact, why don’t you try it? If he replies with, ‘Sorry, I am not Aditya’,
you can always say, ‘Well, from now on, you are….’ and get him to run from the
scene of the crime.
For a long time, I have pondered on just why I am so
forgetful with names. My mother insists
that her mother’s generation had a great memory and that, what with all the
pollution, deteriorating quality of life and television, our generation is getting
an early case of Alzeimer’s or brainstain or whatever. This theory sounded a bit off the rack to me,
so I came with one of my own. Imagine,
then, my delight when I read recently of the Dunbar number, that proves me dead
right (or, let me honest, about a quarter right).
The problem, it seems, is that we are meeting or
corresponding with just too many people these days. This guy, Robin Dunbar, is an Oxford Univ
anthropologist, who, like others of his kind, spends most of his waking hours
reasoning out just why humans make monkeys of themselves, when science did the
reverse. About twenty five years ago, he
found that people tend to self-organise in groups of 150. Humans evolved in groups of about 150 and most
of us interact with about 150 other people.
Now, this was just another piece of research which had no
validity whatsoever, since he had not used Facebook. But, he’s just done that! Yessir, what makes this
absolutely sacred is that Dunbar has studied this pattern in Facebook
communication as well. This number – now
known as Dunbar’s number and I am not making this up – is the upper
limit to how many interpersonal relationships our brains can process.
When I read this, I opened an Excel file and began to write
down the names of everyone I interacted with, in a reasonably regular way. When the list just about crossed 140, it was
time to pop a cork out of a figurative bottle (and close the file). So, why did Dunbar not win a big prize for
this, a prize like the Nobel? The
Swedish guys are always giving it away to frizzy-haired scientists who chase
neutrons in a lab, but ignore those like Dunbar, who make you feel really good
about not having Alzeimer’s or whatever.
It’s high time that right thinking people like you and me have a say in
just who gets the Nobel; awarding these prizes by election would do just fine.
I recommend, with the greatest emphasis, that you do the
exercise I did and feel good about your memory.
If you score like I did, inform your Mum and post it on Facebook,
Twitter and your online college group. If
you score below, much below this number, inform your Doctor. If, that is, you can remember his name.
