Mr. Agrawal, I presume !!

Mr. Agrawal, I presume !!

It is my habit to watch people, especially at airports and railway stations.  TO look at their faces and guess where they come from. Or to look at their clothes and guess what they do for a living. I have also met several people who also do this people-watching.

What I try and do is to look at someone and guess where (which state/ region) the person comes from. Over a period of time I think I am correct about 70% of the time.  In the case of women, I find it easier to guess if they haven’t cut their hair short.

I have mentioned my guessing-game and my results (of 70 %) to several friends, but most have been skeptical about this. Now I am clear it is not a psychic ability. It is more like observation and logic put together.

The logic goes something like this. In a crowd of people of mixed races (White, Caucasian, Blacks, Indians, Chinese, Japanese etc) it is easy for anyone to make out the Mongoloid people (the most prominent feature is slit eyes). They would usually be from China, Japan, and Korea etc. Now most of us Indians can go no further than the Mongoloid identification. But a Chinese person can distinguish Chinese from Japanese from Korean because each has a bone structure/ skin colour / etc which is slightly different from the other. For instance the Chinese have round faces and a yellowish skin, whereas the Japanese have flatter and longer faces and a whiter skin.

As an example closer home, for most people, it is easy to identify Bengalis in a crowd. The logic is that each ethnic type shares a very high percentage of DNA which results in facial similarities. Interestingly we more easily recognize the similarities in people most dis-similar from us. So Europeans/ Americans think all Japanese people look alike, but to the Japanese all (white) Americans look alike.

I will end this post with a personal experience.

I was at Bangalore airport several years ago on a waitlisted ticket. It was waitlist 4. In those days it was the practice that about 30 minutes before flight departure, check-in would close for confirmed passengers and any available seats then would be allotted to waitlist people. The person at the check-in counter would call out the names of the waitlisted passengers, and if the passenger was present she would identify herself and get a seat.

Along with me I could see several more waitlisted passengers (You could always identify the waitlist passengers by their desperate, expectant and hungry look). There was one person there whom I noticed. He was wearing a jacket and must have been about 45. I looked at him and said to myself, this man has to be an Agrawal.  Soon the girl at the counter started announcing the waitlist.

Mr. XYX.. Mr. XYZ, waitlist Number 1. Well this XYZ had not turned up.

Mr. Agrawal, waitlist 2. Mr. Agrawal, Waitlist 2.

And the 45 yr old Mr. Agrawal in a jacket immediately raised his hand and rushed to the check-in desk!