Memoranda

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Here is Thurber writing about Thurber:

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"Thurber's very first bit of writing was a so-called poem entitled 'My Aunt Mrs. John T. Savage's Garden at 185 South Fifth Street, Columbus, Ohio.' It is of no value or importance except insofar as it demonstrates the man's appalling memory for names and numbers. He can tell you to this day the names of all the children who were in the fourth grade when he was. He remembers the phone numbers of several of his high school chums. He knows the birthdays of all his friends and can tell you the date on which any child of theirs is christened. He can rattle off the names of all the persons who attended the lawn fete of the First M. E. Church in Columbus in 1907. This ragbag of precise but worthless information may have helped him in his work, but I don't see how."

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Most kids have very good memories for names and numbers, but Thurber's looks like unique, because he was writing that piece at 50, and uses the present tense. Most of us lose our data in the memory disks of childhood, to be replaced by other 'useful' bytes.

My grannie on the father's side was precocious as a child and was reputed for her memory. But her memory was bookish. When, at 14, I was a (non-paying) guest in her household for a year when she was 80, I used to marvel at her fondness for the Potana Bhagavatam (Telugu). She used to spend about eight hours a day reading it and had most of the Krishnavatara by heart. But she was not interested in worldly affairs and had little memory for names, dates and events.

On the other hand, my grannie on the mother's side was illiterate, but wedded to a Revenue Official and was moving from place to place and her memory was no less keen. She could narrate every event that took place with dates, names, figures, the saris worn by her friends, the ornaments they wore, and the items they cooked that day as vividly as if it happened only yesterday; and she was 80 when she told us these tall tales...very worldly.

My father naturally inherited and imbibed his mom's memory and interests and a couple of days before he passed away (suffering from senile dementia) I tested his long-term memory and he was able to recite the whole of Wordsworth's Daffodils and the Tennyson Tales of King Aurthur and his ludicrous knights; before shooing me away: "Enough is enough...get lost, you Demon (Rakshasa)!"

My mom inherited her mom's vivid memory for worldly matters. She was withdrawn from her schooling after her Class 2 and studied at home rather desultorily. At 90, now, she can tell the names of my classmates in my B Sc (Hons) who were competing with me for the first rank, and the name of the girl I was running after, rather unsuccessfully, till I got that Central Govt Permanent Pensionable Job, after which she was running after me, rather unsuccessfully, when I fled 500 km to KGP.

My wife is a medico, and all medicos those days had to have abominable memories to pass their Anatomy Exam (flexion, adduction, abduction, extension, rotation, elevation, depression, showing them off by thumb movements). But it turned out she lost all interest in medicine after getting married to a genius. She however retained her fantastic memory and can remember dates and names and faces; and I use her as a backup.

It turned out that I had to make a living by lecturing to live audiences at KGP. Listen to our Autocrat who used to lecture moving from place to place much like our itinerant story-tellers (Harikatha Acharyas)...America may be the only country (if you can call it that) where grownup adults (used to) pay fortunes to listen to roving lecturers:

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"...Front seats: a few old folks, --- shiny-headed, --- slant up best ear towards the speaker, -- drop off asleep after a while, when the air begins to get a little narcotic with carbonic acid. Bright women's faces, young and middle-aged, a little behind these, but towards the front, --- (pick out the best, and lecture mainly to that.) Here and there a countenance, sharp and scholarlike, and a dozen pretty female ones sprinkled about. An indefinite number of pairs of young people, --- happy, but not always very attentive. Boys in the background, more or less quiet. Dull faces, here, there, --- in how many places! I don't say dull people, but faces without a ray of sympathy or a movement of expression. They are what kill the lecturer. These negative faces with their vacuous eyes and stony lineaments pump and suck the warm soul out of him; --- that is the chief reason why lecturers grow so pale before the season is over..."

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Well, that is not exactly what I had to face at IIT KGP. Because my audience was not a ragbag random assemblage but was the cream of the country, if not its butter and cheese. But as for memory, my forte is to faces and their expressions.

Like a kid collects postage stamps or coins, I collect interesting faces and their varied expressions and store them in my memory disk...to this day. Needless to say, the most interesting face at KGP was my Guide SDM's. It was so transparent, fluid, and mercurial (whatever that may mean...maybe it refers to the speed of those mercury drops on our glass plates in the Quincke's Method experiment when we tried to press them down). Half of my fascination for him was his pleasurable 'out-of-the-box' personality and the other half was 'business'.

When people talk to me, I listen spellbound, looking at their faces and trying to guess what they are going to say next...mind-reading. Most people want to talk and hog the conversation without realizing that they are giving themselves away. When I am forced to keep the conversation going, I talk talk and talk apparent nonsense, but all the while I keep looking at the faces of my audience to get their reactions and read their minds. That trait perhaps helped me in my job as well. By the time a student gets up and starts asking a question, I could read what was coming before the sentence was over and ready with the answer (if I knew it) or an honest attempt at it.

This trait also enabled me to steer through the politics present in any job without hurting others or myself too much and having a peaceful life.

There was but one Professor who outwitted me in this business. He was a mathematician and, by the time he rose to the eminence of a full professor he acquired and established a reputation for absent-minded unworldliness. It suited him nicely to avoid needless pressures. But, after a couple of interactions, he guessed that I could see that he was faking and seeing through his veil. Since he was thirty years my senior, I kept quiet, but DB told me that he prophesied in public, in my absence:

"Sastry is not going to do any more research now that he got his Ph D under SDM"

How true!

Thief catching bloody thief!!!

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