Getting down to business straight away, I want to find out why are personality analysis methods such a rage. The moment you mention you can read palms, they thrust their open palms before you with remarkable spontaneity. Or ask a few questions proclaiming you can describe their hidden wishes and tendencies - and you are mobbed.

All of us want to know about ourselves. Is this interest? Or self-love, or egomania? Or just an innate reaction to quench the basic human inquisitiveness to find out ‘why am I born’, ‘who am I’, ‘what is the purpose of my life’, and many more such seemingly metaphysical questions that appear to hold the key to success of existence.

People are so curious to know themselves, that curiosity sometimes borders on mania. I hate to use abstract adjectives, but they are so romantically alluring. So do excuse when words like ‘love’, ‘spirituality’ and ‘existence’ are dissected by my unskilled ‘pen’!

Love needs an object – it can be a person, or it can be oneself. So, doesn’t one like to know all about the object of one’s love? And you end up reading eyes, faces and gestures to know the person you love. And if you are narcissistic, you have that huge mirror in your bedroom!

They say, love makes you accept an imperfect person perfectly. Acceptance requires understanding and realization of a person’s qualities as well as lacunae – and moulding a part of oneself to suit the loved one. They also say the current generation is in love with itself and doesn’t look beyond the frank gratification of self interests. We are driven to earn as soon as possible and to take unashamed decisions to fulfill material needs. It is a very ‘Id’ oriented generation, Freud would have said!

That implies we have a very loving generation at hand, which, ideally, should live in perfect harmony with each other and oneself!

But the hitch is – there is hardly any harmony. Where is all the love hanging unused then?

One ugly truth is the inevitable impatience that accompanies a straight-forward attitude, and has become a part of us. We can’t wait for things to take their own sweet time – we end up making them sweeter with our fast-paced dexterity. We want things to be accurate, adept. Unable to accept the imperfections of the world, we try hard to get into the heart of the matter face up. Boldness, thus, comes naturally. And on the flip side, we have got used to quick gratifications.

We want answers, and fast. And the disquiet that runs alongside undoes the impatient nerves more than ever before. Can you figure where we have landed? We have led ourselves to the eternal question of humanity – the existential angst!

In this way, the current generation is more spiritual than its ancestors and more in your face as well. They are not proud about this exalted trait, though. They are matter-of-fact about it. Not encumbered by the baggage of pride in our goodness and piousness, we are better equipped at finding the answers and hence are more spiritual, in a concrete, realistic manner.

And what are the ways of finding our answers? Basic, obviously. We want to know ourselves.

Ironically, when we run out of exalted adjectives, we are left with creating an anticlimax out of our answers.

As a result, we have the different ways of personality analysis. We have handwriting analysis, where you can pore over anyone’s scribble and declare this belongs to a sentimental fool who lets his heart rule over his head, or even say (quite eerily, it is mostly correct!) that this guy has an artistic inclination, who plunges into projects with very high energy that does not last the completion of the work at hand – quite a revelation this!

Then there is the personality analysis that weighs your colour preferences at the moment and declares your state of mind. And they can also describe you by groping your skull. I don’t mean anything erotic, for skull must be the least erogenous zones of all body parts – I mean by feeling the shape of your skull! These skull-handling people like to call themselves ‘Phrenologists’.

Talking of morphology, the size and shape of your palm and fingers reveals your personality, so do your facial features! And why even mention ‘body language’ when it is a language in itself! The moment you step in view, all your body movements reveal what you are. How unnerving to feel that one is being read like an open book! What else, they even belt out whole paragraphs if you let slip your favorite colour. And of course, the universal favorite is reading sun signs. If you were born in January, you ought to possess a prescribed list of characteristics.

Personality traits that go according to sun-signs are the most interesting of all these. A subjective influence affects my judgment here, I agree, but I bet it would affect yours too, once you hear the following story.

My brother’s sun sign was Cancer. He swore by an elaborate list of traits that conformed to his personality. He had the Cancerian sentiments, and he had the famous crabby humour. He said he was ruled by the major ‘M’ of Cancer, i.e. money, mother and mood. All this he held true until a day when my mother, rummaging through age-old papers and memorabilia, discovered a long lost letter.

It was my uncle’s letter to my father, who was away due to an emergency. In the letter, my uncle had congratulated my father on becoming the dad of a cute boy.

It was dated May 27. Till that moment, due to some cosmic error, my brother had been celebrating his birthday every 26th of June religiously.

The funny part comes now. Pre-discovery, my brother was a Cancerian. Then he turned out to be a Gemini. Now he swears by another elaborate list of traits that conform to his personality. He has the Gemini versatility and he possesses the famous Gemini trait of multitasking. He says he is ruled by the cerebral abilities of the ‘twins’. And I go blue questioning his analysis but he still grins from ear to ear, claiming the sun-sign traits work wonderfully well! Do you have any clue to the applicability of the analysis?

I think the only thing that works best is a first look. You see someone for the first time and you decide: good or bad. This is instinct. And, of course, I am not talking about love at first sight. That is an excuse at giving way to the madness that lurks inside everyone, and when we are through pumping up the hormones after a few months (or years, according to individual capacity!) we wonder what had got us that we behaved thus?!

The basic intuition runs strong. The first look triggers an instinct reaction. When Abraham Lincoln fired that manager stating he did not like his face, he was actually referring to his ingrained human ability to judge– instinct. Call it hunch, sixth sense or inkling, that strange unexplainable feeling always says the correct thing. It doesn’t say much, and perhaps therein lies its accuracy.

Not so sure? Look at a woman beside you and try to read her face. I don’t say you will get an answer. But watch her reactions– that is instinct, and it never fails. She must have judged you right by the time you are figuring out what her impression in your mind means. Woman’s instinct!