REMEMBERING

The film “Ghajini” delves into a case of anterograde amnesia. The memory of the hero is reduced to a recall of just fifteen minutes, following a violent attack by the killers of his girlfriend. To avenge the past as well as remember his present-day plan, the protagonist uses memory pegs in terms of Diaries, Polaroid photo-images, permanent tattoos on his torso, scribbled notes and memory alerts on his mobile. While the film takes creative liberty to tell its tale of fiction, it has a lesson for us…

Consider our own predicament. There are times when we are seized with a passion and a mission to respond to a challenging situation. It could be a brazen terrorist strike… or a shameful act of corruption… or the murder of humanity in a communal riot… or an exploit of exploitation… or a criminal lapse in governance! But, as time passes our noble intentions begin to detach from our consciousness… we suffer from memory loss of our own cause…

Righteous intentions need to be guarded against loss of focus… Like the protagonist in the film, we need to use memory pegs… We need to maintain diaries that account for what we are thinking, what we are doing and what we are going through… We must document our dreams and plans through notes, sketches, photographs, blogs, etc… We must surround ourselves with knowledge resources like books, quotations, vision and mission statements, and the like.

Amnesia patients may have no choice but to prop up their memory with methods and mechanisms… But for the rest of us, “remembering” is about making a choice… We can choose to remember what we believe in or we can choose to forget to walk our own talk…It is all about putting in the crucial extra effort to fasten our thoughts, plans and actions with the glue of a convergent memory…

To BE BETTER at remembering what we tend to forget…
Peg in extra effort today, lest the future be one of regret!

- Pravin