Corona Daily 132: An Analogy

Have you ever memorized a poem? Surely you have - as a student in school. One rarely loves anything in textbooks strongly enough to store it in memory. And yet the academic systems until recently needed students to memorise a lot of things: poems, Mendelev’s table, math formulas and so on.

In India, we call the memorisation process “learning by heart”, even when the learner’s heart is somewhere else. In my school days, I memorised at least three chapters of Bhagvad-Geeta, Sanskrit conjugation, film songs, dozens of prayers, multiplication tables till thirty, all phone numbers I knew, value of π till fifty decimals (fairly useless unless you want to impress your first love) and poems – lots of poems. Because I loved Marathi poetry.  

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Years later, as a thinking adult, I asked myself how I managed to memorise so many poems. And some of them were fairly long. Certainly I would read it once, then again, a few times more, and the poem became part of me. Exactly at which reading I learnt a particular poem ‘by heart’ I can’t tell. But I can confidently say it didn’t happen in one reading. Only freaks or accidental brains or professional memory practitioners may be able to memorise a poem without repetitive learning.

In my life, I have been fortunate to meet many stage and film actors closely. With cultivated skill, they are capable of memorising passages quickly, particularly before shooting for a TV serial. Stage actors don’t even have the liberty of twisting the playwright’s words. How do they store pages of dialogue to reproduce it verbatim?

Curious about this, in 2009, I played a role in a full-length Marathi play at our annual neighbourhood event. I dreaded watching the DVD recording, but am proud to say I didn’t miss a single line of several lengthy dialogues. It was, unfortunately or fortunately, my only performance. Twelve years have passed since. Today, I am not able to remember any of the lines.

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My friends or readers sometimes ask me why covid vaccines require two shots, two identical shots at that. Not trained in science, but fond of poetry, I tell them that a poem needs to be repeated before it can be memorized. The first time you read it, you may remember a few lines, or the rhythm, or the skeleton, but not the poem in its entirety. If you need to perform it on stage, would you do it after the first reading? Our immune system needs repetition of the vaccine dose before it is confident to go to the battlefield against coronavirus.

And now Pfizer and others are developing a third shot- called a booster. What is that? That is simply because the coronavirus is changing certain lines of the poem or adding new stanzas. We don’t need to memorise the poem from scratch, only memorise the amended couplets.

Are two shots, two repetitions, enough? Well, if we were to take a Moderna shot eight or ten times, certainly its imprint on our body’s memory will be fantastic. But the whole world will be working only in the vaccine business. Pragmatically, two is the number currently decided, particularly because the virus may keep changing the stanzas in the poem.

What about the gap between the shots? The second shot must be given before the first is forgotten. Four weeks is that point as determined by scientists. Of course, it can be delayed, and delayed, but who knows at which point the first shot is forgotten.

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How is it that several childhood vaccines are taken only once, and the effect lasts for life? That is an important question with relation to covid vaccines. The world of science is trying to grapple with “vaccines for adults”, which is not a norm.

I don’t remember a single line from the play enacted twelve years ago. But I flawlessly remember my childhood poetry more than forty years later. Can this be done for covid? Will the scientists be able to develop an infant coronavirus vaccine that will protect a child lifelong? That is the question.

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Ravi