I have always been curious about people’s names- to know how they were chosen and what they mean.
Earlier the names were simple; most of them. Not many were hard to pronounce either, and were pretty common too. So much so that, I once made my friend, from another school, believe that I knew a ‘Divya’ from her class.
It was easy to guess a name – there would always be a Divya, Deepa, Ramya or Shruthi in a class. And there were some kids with the same name too, and it was fun distinguishing them. We either knew them by their initials/surnames or nicknames. After so many years, it is interesting to see how I remember almost all of these initials/nicknames, just because we had to keep them in mind to remember their names.
Now names seem to be getting harder to remember. There still are a few names that are commonly used, but most of them seem to be hard to get at the first time we hear it and it is definitely a task to remember them. Aging might also be an issue here, when it comes to memory. Add to it that tiny mechanism in the brain, whose sole task is to grab the piece of information (here, the name someone just mentioned, more often than not of a neighbour or colleague that you are sure to meet again) and put it into a shredder which, I am sure, is placed conveniently near the long-term memory part of our brain. Bye bye name!
Next time you come across them, get ready for some serious mind meandering, to remember what their name was, or to get access to that one ‘hint’ that you would have kept to associate something to the name for easy remembrance. The hints are like that ‘safe’ place you keep any of your important stuff in. It turns out to be so safe that even you don’t have access to it!
You are bound to remember the name or that helpful hint (which turns out to be of no help after all) either a lot later than when you needed it, or you just give up on your memory and ask their name, yet again.
