Ouchmytoe.com

Growing up in India can be difficult. Especially, if your name was Jamshed Velayuda Rajan Ramaswamy. I have endured my name for long…but now I am wondering if I should change it to…Robin Wood…or maybe William Won`t Tell…or perhaps Shake The Sphere. Don`t blame me for the name change. I myself shudder to think of the logistics of it. But enough is enough.

Legend has it that patriotic reasons helped me land this name. How much I wish I were awake during the naming ceremony; I would have never let my father run away with all the credit.

‘Jamshed` was the Parsee and Muslim part, ‘Velayuda`, the Hindu element and ‘Rajan` the Christian fraction. For the record Velayuda means Lord Murugan in Tamil and Rajan is a popular Christian name among Malayalees. Or so my parents thought.

Few critics in the family believe that my father could have been led by Jamshedji Ratanji Tata`s success in deciding my name. Wonder if my father had such high expectations from me.

In case you haven`t guessed, I was born in Jamshedpur, Bihar. Now you know where I get my monkey tail from – from the land of Laloo!

Over a period of time, I would shed parts of my name. Firstly, I dropped my surname- Ramaswamy. With no time, I became JV Rajan.

This was a phase when my stupid friends started calling me TV Rajan. Don`t know if it had to do with that experiment of mine…where in an attempt to create a mega magnifying glass, I would drill a hole in our TV`s picture tube and fill it with water.

My motivation, you might ask…but only days earlier I had broken off the aluminum part of a 100 watts round bulb and filled it with water to convert it into a sort of magnifying glass. Not content with smaller achievements, I would move on to the picture tube of our huge EC TV. For the record the TV was so huge that whenever my mother scolded me, I would get in with food supplies for 2-3 days and escape the World. That was the first time when my mother saw me on TV. For a moment she even thought I was a celebrity.

(More on this TV thing later).

But today, I have dropped all the three parts of my legendary name. And the World addresses me as Jammy.

*I have always referred to my height in centimeters because 165 cms definitely sounds taller and better than 5 feet 3 inches (or is it 4 inches?).

Sometimes life can be really cruel to you. It hurts more when you have been trying to be nice.

Yesterday, it was raining when I left home to reach office in time. I have been using Rekha`s TVS Scooty ever since we came back after marriage. And mind you, she still has a big ‘L` board on her vehicle.

The riding was difficult. The waterlogged roads were epitomes of bottlenecks and the traffic was equally bad. Yet there was no dearth of hitchhikers. Through my wet glasses, which one of these days will be fitted with a pair of wipers, I could see a middle-aged man signal frantically for somebody to stop and give him a lift.

It was raining and here was a fellow human being left with no transport but a pair of legs to traverse the potholes ridden Velachery Road. My heart went out to him. I stopped next to him and shouted to be heard: “Hop on, will drop you on the main road.”

He walked a few steps towards me, and then stood still on his tracks. Despite it being just rain, he froze. And then said: “That`s fine, you go ahead. I will manage.”

I was taken aback. I did not understand.

“Why? What happened? I though you wanted a lift and now you refusing?”

“No sir, that`s fine. You go ahead. I will manage.”

I could hold it no longer. He was testing my patience in pouring rain, and that I can tell you is a difficult test to pass.

“But why?”, I enquired indignantly.

By now, the man had managed to wave down another two-wheeler and was in a hurry to finish the conversation. Even as I sat on Rekha`s TVS Scooty, in pouring rain wondering what went wrong, he would say… “Saar, neengale orru ‘L` Board*” …before vanishing behind a sheet of rain.

*In English it means: “You still carry the ‘L` Board tag.”