Comment

Not remembering things past is now legit, especially if you are above 45. “I love you” opens some doors, but the three magic words today are “I don’t remember”. We have it on the authority of scientists from two august institutions, The Centre for Research in Epidemiology and Population Health in France and University College London, who published a report in the British Medical Journal this month. The 10-year study of more than 7,000 British government workers says that memory, reasoning and comprehension skills can start to deteriorate as early as age 45 instead of 60, as was thought previously.

This is depressing news if you are middle-aged and have a niggling suspicion that your brain is on the slide each time you forget a friend’s birthday or run into a smiling face whose name just does not click. But look at it this way. There is the bright side. The fear of memory loss is enough to get one scampering towards all sorts of fitness and health-boosting diets and activities, which one would have ignored in more ignorant times. Then, there is the reassuring feeling that “I don’t remember” is not just a life-saving phrase when one is in an embarrassing spot, it now has a scientific cache.

If all this makes one think of a certain Suresh Kalmadi or a BS Yeddyurappa, so be it. Kalmadi was born in 1944, Yeddyurappa in 1943. If memory loss could start at 45, all our leading politicians are at risk. In such circumstances, it would be surely unreasonable to expect these gents in their sixties to be completely immune to what scientists call “cognitive decline”. If they don’t remember or can only partially recollect details of all the actsthey are being charged with, it is not a matter to laugh at.

Kalmadi, 68, was arrested for allegedly tucking into the funds meant for the Commonwealth Games. Since last April, he has been in Tihar jail. All through last year, there was wild speculation whether Kalmadi was suffering from dementia. He went through tests at the neurology department of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences and subsequently told the media that the problem was in his heart, not in the brain. But one never knows.

There could be asudden,sharp memory loss blanking out all details of which contracthe awarded to whom and how much loss it entailed to the public exchequer.

Kalmadi is not the only man in Indian politics with a memory problem. It is well known that former Karnataka chief minister Yeddyurappa, on the mat for multiple graft cases and indicted in the Lokayukta report in the illegal mining scam, is plagued by neurological problems. Last August, he had to be hospitalised because he was “in a confused state of mind”, according to media reports.

The “I don’t remember” affliction is not confined to Indian politicos. Last month, a Paris court found France’s former president Jacques Chirac, 79, guilty of the misuse of public funds to illegally finance his political party using fake jobs during his tenure as mayor of Paris in the 1990s. Chirac got a two-year suspended prison sentence but did not attend the trial because of what were said to be health and memory problems.

Nunun Nurbaeti, a suspect in a high-profile graft case linked to the election of a senior central bank official in Indonesia, has also repeatedly complained of severe memory loss. The Jakarta Post recently reported that Nurbaeti had been admitted to hospital, for the third time since she was arrested in Thailand, with complications caused by high blood pressure.

All this seems to suggest that there is a cosmic connection between loss of memory and money, especially when there is lots of it. The best thing about this sub-type of memory loss is that one can suddenly regain it.

There is one more piece to the jigsaw — the hospital. The sufferers often need to be rushed to a hospital, sometimes to the intensive care unit (ICU), as was the case with 86-year-old Sukhram, a former Union minister. A court sent him to jail to serve his three-year sentence in the 1993 telecom scam case. But within a day, he had moved to a hospital ICU, citing multiple ailments. And then he got interim bail the next day.

The ICU as safe haven is an idea whose time has surely come.

But there is a caveat. Its shine will fade if rats start nibbling at a patient, as they recently did to a paralysed 70-year-old in the ICU of a government hospital in Rajasthan.

The author is a Delhi-based writer