Smell

I don't now why do we overlook our organ of olfaction...ask anyone about a favourite memory, you'll get to hear about a sight/a person/ a song/a story but rarely is it associated with or triggered by the sense of smell.

And yet what I would do without my ability to smell? Without smell, there's no taste. Everything seems insipid. Smell is that sense which laces memories subtly on the egdes, gives them character and flavour.

I don't know why I have a lots of smells stored in my mind. Everytime my hair cells catch that odour again, my mind hurtles back to retrieve some old incident that I'd almost forgotten.

Earlier, when staying in my old building, going up in the manual lift with iron grille, I'd try to guess what was cooking in every floor by the smell wafting in! And coming home after college at almost 10 at night, dead tired, my mood would improve in the few seconds before the main door opened, by simply smelling and guessing right what Maa had made for dinner!

Here are my top 5 fav smells (fav b'coz they are evocative)...

1) The wet earth;the first shower of rains...sensual
2)Freshly washed and laundered bedsheets with the smell of Ariel imbibed into the fabric...delicious
3) The smell associated with new clothes in an AC showroom...tangy, sharp
4)Freshly made, homemade ghee...especially at the part when the black crust is beginning to be formed...yummy
5) A baby, freshly bathed, fed, burped powdered and asleep...homely.

Go out and smell(avoiding the garbage dumps)... Life's beautiful.

P.S. Try reading Radhika Jha's novel 'Smell'.... not necessarily the best neither the latest book on the shelf, but very erotic, very French and very different.

Or its predecessor in a similiar vein-'Perfume' by Patrick Suskind-a somewhat over-the-top read but totally fascinating and evocative when it comes to writing about smell...

Not feeling is worse than not knowing.Or not remembering

A flash, a glimpse, a photo, an image,a smell, a scent, a word,...
At first just a hazy recollection...

And then your neurons going on an overdrive, the rapid flux of ions, the unfolding of synapses,chemical connections made and then broken, circuits switched on and then off, the dregging of the storehouses of memory,the amygdala and the hippocampus working in tandem, firing impulses to the frontal cortex...

A vision, a blur, a 'just on the tip of the tongue feeling'...

And then Voila! The memory flashes LOUD and CLEAR, the vivid remembrance, the EMOTION...

Ah what bliss, what joy, the limbic system. The beloved Papez circuit.

"People might forget what you said. People might forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel"