Tags:
Journalism of Courage
The Time correspondent has unnecessarily made much of Atalji8217;s forgetfulness. Our beloved PM might be old and ailing but that, by itself, does not warrant forgetfulness. From all evidence, lapses of memory don8217;t necessarily have a link with senility.
We had a nonagenarian grandfather who used to torture us with memories of his childhood and youth until a day before his demise. Then there is this friend of mine who once went to a petrol bunk. His wife, who was riding pillion, had got down and was waiting patiently for the tank of the two-wheeler to fill. But it was a case of fill it, shut it, forget the missus, with my friend. He just rode away. It was only when his eight-year-old son asked after his mother that he remembered his faux pas. But by then it was too late. The livid wife came home in a rickshaw and for the next two days refused to talk to him!
But it is the lover who most suffers from this vice of forgetfulness. From time immemorial, many in this category have allowed the ones they loved to go to rack and ruin because of their forgotten promises.
There is another type who is a past master at forgetfulness. He is the guy who takes a loan from you. Give a loan and lose friend, or so the popular saying goes. There was this man who came and cried before me for a loan of Rs 10,000 because his mother was fighting for her life in hospital. I knew him and respected him as a writer. I didn8217;t have the money so I got it organised from a local moneylender at an interest rate of 5 per cent per month. As long as the money had not materialised, this man called me every second hour to decant his sob story into my sympathetic ears.
But no sooner did he pocket the cash than he forgot everything 8212; even my very existence. The loan was to be repaid in one month. It has been two years since that transaction had taken place. It is his loan and I am still paying an interest of Rs 500 every month for it! People even forget their parents when it comes to protecting their own interests. What Polish writer Shalom Asch wrote more than 60 years ago still holds good today: not the power to remember but its very opposite the power to forget is a necessary condition for our existence. Quite.
