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?).