Name Game

Sometimes I really wonder at people who are gifted with an amazing quality to remember names and associate the same with people. My lack of this quality has many a times landed me into such embarassing situation that I would have rather stayed in the extremes of Kazakhastan than face them.

Some networking sites have made things easier in a way, to network with friends and also to easily remember the names and associate them with the faces (provided the friend has been kind enough to upload his recent snap or the one with which you remember him/her. The website developers have also been kind enough to provide birthday reminders such that you will never miss to wish a person on his birthday which has come as a boon to people like me who are unfortunately blessed with a queer quality to remember someone's birthday till the day before the D'day and then on that particular day, like an old macitosh the memory network just fails.

But my real problem is to associate peoples names and their faces. Sometimes it is so bad that after spending nearly a whole day with someone (maybe in a train, or at work etc), I just cannot reacll the name the next day. Now some kind people who have opposite qualities than mine, who are kind enough to send Friend requests on these networking sites, have to either wait invariable till I accept the invitation with a sudden spark in my memory or have to get their friend requests turned down, owing to my failing memory. One such incident that happened in the last couple of days has made me to really wonder if there is any help available to set my memory right...just like one would oil a creaking engine. There was a friend request from a girl in my networking profile, and I put my memory to hard test but in vain. At last when I kept seeing the Friend request everyday on my home page, I decided to accept the request. But nevertheless, I kept trying hard to place the person ( unfortunately enough, I could not even associate her with the snaps provided in her profile). I asked many of our common friends(also a feature of the networking site..remarkably enough) about this person who had by then spookily kept me busy thinking and trying to remember....but their various methods to help me also failed.

Atlast, not withstanding anymore suspense, I asked the person in question about who she was...and she also explained to me various situations where she spoke to me and had been my aquaintance during college which was not more than 8 years back....but...to my absolutely filtered brain, recovering her identity was as good as climbing Mount Everest. She has promised to send me her other snaps, by means of which I hope to recongnise her or then my obvious conclusion would be that there has been a mix of identity issues, maybe her memory has failed to identify the right person and mixed with me and hence the possibility that I do not know her at all.....

Ironically enough, nature plays a very very funny game with us, we hardly can forget all those people whom we wish to forget (like my ex-boss for example and the neighbour with whom I had a big fight one day or the Geography(or was it chemistry) teacher who punished me in school for not paying attention to her most boring class or the horrid face of Saddam being executed etc etc ) and cannot remember the people who send us friend requests...knowing that they have been our aquaintaces before.....