"He forgets when he has to go to sleep, he forgets when he has to come out of his bathroom.

"Sometimes for six hours Einstein used to remain in his bathtub – till his wife started making too much fuss, knocking on the door. And she was understanding, hence she tolerated as much as was possible – but six hours in the bathtub! And she would be sitting with his lunch getting cooler and cooler and colder and colder, and she knew it was not good to disturb him because even while he was in his bathtub playing with the soap bubbles, his mind was moving into depths of the universe.

"He discovered his theory of relativity in his bathroom. He used to say, 'Don't disturb me. Nothing is more important. When I am moving in a certain direction, and I am coming close to the clue, and you knock on the door Let lunch be cold, throw it away, because just for your lunch you have distracted me. I was just getting close; now I am as far away as I was before. And nobody knows when again I will come so close to the point. It is not within my hands.' Now, this man is certainly obsessed.

"Edison was a great genius; perhaps nobody else has so many discoveries to his name, to his credit, as Edison: one thousand discoveries. But he was so obsessed that once he forgot his own name. That is a very rare possibility, most improbable – forgetting one's own name! Then you can forget anything.

"It was before the First World War, when, for the first time in the world, ration cards were invented, and he had gone to take his ration. He was standing in a line and people went on moving forward. When his number came and he was at the front of the line, they called again and again, 'Thomas Alva Edison, is there anybody by the name of Thomas Alva Edison?' And he looked here and there: who is this Thomas Alva Edison?

"One neighbor standing behind, far back in the line, said, 'What are you looking at? You are Thomas Alva Edison, I know you.'

"He said, 'If you say so, then certainly I must be, because you are such a nice guy, you can't lie.'

"What happened to him? How did he forget his name? Even standing in the queue for the ration card, he was not there."