I was pretty excited when I sat down to write this article. But the title frustrated me to such an extent, I had to use Inky Pinky Ponkie to select it from “ what lies in a name”, “Namesake”, “for the namesake”, “for the sake of the name” etc etc. You can judge my creativity (or lack of it) by them, but that is another issue. Shakespeare was surely nuts when he said nothing lies in a name. Though he and I were born in the same Kalyug, described so elaborately by our beloved Krishna (or was it Krishn? Krishan? Kishna? Kkrish?) there seems to be a considerable difference between his Kalyug and my Kalyug, where we play games over multiple names, and that too rapidly changing. So while Bangalore becomes Bengaluru and Pondicherry becomes Puducherry, in the latest politically correct movement of stupidity, the state of Orissa will now be called Odisha (or that is what I have heard). But there is one solace. There are some public servants like our dear Raj Thackeray and Bal Thackeray [aint it funny both have three letter names? Seems like there mother was an ardent fan of Balraj Sahney and named her twins after him. “THEY ARE NOT TWINS. BAL IS RAJ’s UNCLE!” Oh, I m sorry. The explanation was just so tempting.] Where was I? oh yes, that people like Bal-Raj keep it alive in our mind that Bombay is now Mumbai, by ransacking the showrooms of Bombay Dyeing, or making a few Karan Johars apologize for using the word ‘Bombay’ in films. Who knows if someone forgets the city name? There is also a demand for our Bal-Raj in Arunachal Pradesh [known as South Tibet in China] for a similar reason. But the Chinese government has expressed its “strongest dissent over any such development”. It is getting political so I back off right now. Though there is another resolution being sought in UN that the chaiwalas in Arunachal (or south Tibet) replace Tata tea by chini chai, the arguments given are very absurd. So it’s very likely to be rejected.
While the fight between South Tibet and Arunachal Pradesh (or vice versa) continues, I hear continuous Vedic like chants of V-e-n-k-a-t-a-n-a-r-a-s-i-m-h-a-r-a-j-u-v-a-r-i-p-e-t-a in the background. Comes out that my younger brother is learning some Andhra city name. His own name is Dev, but is mostly known as chunnu, munnu, pappu, nunnu, chandu, pikku, honey, sweetu, etc by relatives of different origin. In fact, he has so many names; I never remember his real one. I like the English custom better here. A person gets the nick name as a by product of his name. So Robert is Bob, William is Bill, Elizabeth is Beth or Betty and so on. This must save some bucks in the naamkaran. But I bet our punditji won’t like this. Neither will Mayawati, if punditji comes out to be a dalit. She might just demolish my home and build a statue at its place, bearing a note, “MAYAWATI WELCOMES YOU”. So I better not comment on that. Unconfirmed reports have even suggested that behenji is changing her name to Maayawati. But I won’t comment on that too. I will instead give a closer example. One of my lady friends recently met a punditji and added another ‘a’ at the end of her name, making it terminally elongated. But a not so predicted advantage is that it sounds more melodious now.
Helping the naives, I must inform that the last line falls in the realms of flirting. For more flirting tips, my name is the one written after this line. Or is it?
-Rohan Budhiraja
