By Alan Saldanha
I gave up fishing after making seven visits to a sanguine lake in British Columbia and not catching a single fish. I cannot blame it on the new fishing rod I bought from Walmart and neither can I attribute it to the earthworms that looked juicy to me. A month later someone told me I should have gone to the other end of the lake. Coming to think of it, he had a point - there were no anglers around where I stood.
Albert Einstein once said that a man who has not made a mistake has not done a thing. In my 65 years, I have made more mistakes than I would care to document and yet I appear bereft of wisdom. And then, suddenly I remembered the old adage, ‘If you are a dimwit at 5, you will be a dimwit at 65!”
I have finally accepted that I am not what I thought I was. I thought I was God’s gift to layman’s science and impromptu literature. I even attempted an unwarranted explanation with an analogy for the Higgs Boson theory by citing the case of two Japanese sumo wrestlers facing each other after an spicy Indian meal and standing at either end of a 17 mile tunnel blowing protons at the speed of light and feeling their “mawashi” belt get wet.
It is funny how I stood by my analogy saying that more people understood me than did the particle scientists who were too busy savoring their newly found status as rock stars in Switzerland. Incidentally, nobody thought of the question “Who made the Higgs boson?”
My problem is attention span. I have an attention span so short I can forget names in one-sixty-eighth of a second after they are told to me. Some people can work wonders in that span of time. Indian cricket maestro Sachin Tendulkar can sight a cricket ball bowled at him in the flash of a second and deal with it on its merits.
Hence, if you are introduced to me, don’t expect me to say: “Really Dennis…?” Instead I prefer to prompt and probe with: “How do you spell that?”
The second time I make an attempt at association. For e.g. Dennis is a menace or Bal is Balwinder. But then the latter is confusing because it can mean Balbir, Baljit, Balkishan and so on. But there is also a win in the name so I associate it with a winner. That works for me except on rare occasions when I am introduced to a Polish person by the name of Zbigenew and he tells me how it is spelt though it is pronounced “Ezbeshek.”
But it is not the little things that make me wonder if I am okay in the head. I can endlessly scan the shelf of a supermarket to later discover that the can of sausages that I was looking for was to my right in the middle row.
Giving the appearance of being dumb has its plus points. If someone gives me instructions and asks me, “Understand?” I nod my head with the motion of a reef knot tied in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. That way, I mean yes but it looks like no. And so the instructions are repeated. Soon after, I give my customer a brief three minute sales pitch and bag the order.
I am sure the customer must be thinking, “I am cleverer than this guy, so why not?”
Some people accept my spells of dimwittedness and have learned to cherish the good things I offer. After all, I am not a dullard all the time.
I am a proficient cook, though I set a bad example. Couples who visit us sometimes see a display of culinary genius and later fight because the obvious question is, “Why can’t you cook like Alan?”
And in case you are wondering that is the wife questioning the husband!
One of them even had the audacity to brush me off with the remark, “Ever heard of a good cook being a Cassanova?” To that I imagine a furious debate would ensue.
Of late, I have begun to accept myself the way I am. I keep to myself and interact little with others. It is not so much that I give myself less chance to goof up; it is just that I think how wrong I have been all my life when I judged others.
And I really did not have sufficient justification to think highly of myself.
The writer is the publisher of Daywatch newspaper in Surrey, British Columbia. He can be reached at daywatchnewspaper@gmail.com.