Creating Nicknames

Nicknames are always interesting. Chhotu and Motu are the garden variety ones, but if we exercise the grey cells, we could come up with newer, gooder- err, better-ones.

Example- Bhatinde ka tinda.

Here are a few names that my batchmates were called. (It seems as if there were many people fully occupied in coining nicknames rather than doing their MBA!)

R2D2 (Star Wars character), Tintin, UFO, Dangler, Gadfly (real name Gadkari),

Dede (inspired by a prof whose last name was Lele), Bond 003(this was a girl),

Shah of Kiraan (Kiran was his first name), Jerome K. Jerome (Jayram), Toddler, Bhau,

Mandrake (for Manglik), Gothix, Fu Manchu, Marcus Gundolius (guess who?)

Bishop, Thalaivar, Henry Fayol (for Srikant Payal), Dancing Queen (for a guy who danced his way into our hearts), Captain Haddock,

POM I, POM II and POM III (after a course called Production and Operations Management, which was not exactly the most liked. The OM stands for Old Man.

Nicknames

Creating nicknames is a creative pastime, and should be encouraged. We had a batchmate amongst our class of 1982-84 PGDM who single-handedly created many nicknames for our profs. Cadbury was the name chosen for one who resembled Richie Rich's butler.

Of course, we all had nicknames in the batch-some were created, some fell into place naturally. Here is a list of some interesting ones-

Henry Fayol for Srikanth Payal

Talaivar for Sriram

Sexy for Shakti Ghosal

Abbajan for Siraj Siddiqui

Bhau for Ramani

Dunhill for (The) Anil Srivastava

Gobish for Gautam Biswas

Pakad Baees (Catch 22 in Hindi) for Harish Arora

Dukhi for PK Gopalakrishnan

Han Jian for Anil Jain

Smoke Smoke for Swamimalai Srinivasan Ramesh

POM I for A. Ramamurthy (there were two other POMs in the batch)

Dancing Queen for A Ramesh Kumar

Tappu for Sajiv Menon

Chasha for Chandramouli Sarma

Mandrake for Himanshu Manglik

Shah of Kiraan for Kiran shah

Banana Tax for Kishore Kelekar

R2D2 for S. Sivaram

Paranjyoti for Narayan Das

Toffler for R. Sridhar

Gothix for I.K. Gautam

Rajan of India (ROI) for M.S. Rajan

Fu Manchu for S. Kantimathinathan

and Gunds for me :)

Election Graffiti

Elections are usually the time for acerbic wit, and even usually docile people suddenly get animated. Some of the gems that keep popping up have to do with nicknames- Pappu, Pheku, Maut ka saudagar,  and so on.

A new title was coined after the very notorious weapon of mass destruction, aka the AK-47. This one is known as AK-49, named after the party founder who first did a sit-in, and then a walk-out from his own government, all in just 49 days. His cap and muffler have provided wonderful fodder to all the cartoonists around. A cartoon showed NaMo cough syrup as an antidote to his recalcitrant cough.

The case of the pot calling the kettle black is also pretty prevalent. Every party blames the other for all kinds of omissions and commissions (I am not referring to commissions of enquiry here, they are a saga unto themselves), as if they are comprised of saints and Mahatmas.  I wonder if the holier-than-thou posturing comes from having celebrated Holi recently! It is quite amusing to see banalities and generalities being bandied around with gay (used in a hetero context) abandon.

But the bottomline for me is that the election continuing to be fought every five years on the same issues, even after 65 odd years. Gives you a feeling of having been gypped, doesn't it?

Nicknames

Nicknames are something we are usually ashamed of. They are given to us by parents or friends, who find the original names inconvenient, even if they gave them- parents, I mean.

Stars also have nicknames, and prefixes or suffixes. Sample these-

Garam Dharam.
Kaka- Rajesh Khanna
Bebo- Kareena
Piggy Chops- Priyanka
Bips- Ms. Basu
Jubilee Kumar- Rajendra Kumar

Some have a positioning statement, like

Dream Girl- Hema Malini
Poor man's Amitabh- Mithun Chakraborty
Angry young man- Amitabh himself
Tragedy King- Dilip Kumar
Tragedy Queen- Meena Kumari-
Mr. Perfection- Aamir Khan