Question

Will you sympathize or ridicule someone who is intensely forgetful? Write an essay justifying your point of view.

Answer 1

Forgetfulness, if deemed a form of freedom, must be welcome. But what one forgets matters. Similar to the father who forgot the baby in the perambulator if one forgets main duties, he would become an anathema to even family members. I wouldn’t be hasty to ridicule a person who “suffers” from acute or intense forgetfulness. I would observe, in the first place, what are the items he forgets routinely. Are they trifles or serious things? If a married man forgets his wife and children and forgets his filial duties, then he deserves chastisement and not ridicule.

If forgetting leads to comic situations like wearing chappals on the wrong foot or wearing the tie in a funny manner, sometimes a person of extraordinary intelligence may forget his residential address similar to Einstein. Scientists and great philosophers like Socrates and Rabindranath Tagore suddenly went into spells of deep contemplation totally forgetting where they were heading to. Once it so happened that Socrates went into a trance on a road. His disciples and friends stood around him the whole day. Night came. Friends bought mats and pillows and slept around him hoping to listen to his words of wisdom as soon as the spell breaks and remembers what he saw in his world of imagination.

Towards dawn, the spell broke. Socrates saw the people sleeping around him. He just carefully walked back home. I have my heart-felt sympathies for my friends who study just before the examination and forget what they learned in the examination hall. I’ve my conviction that those who forget naturally need to be treated with a sympathetic understanding because they really don’t know that they forget. Those who suffer from selective amnesia, I mean politicians who give tall promises before elections but remember to forget them soon after winning the elections need to be ridiculed by funny cartoons and in public places because they have done a breach of trust.

“There is some pleasure even in words when they bring forgetfulness of present miseries.”