Not more than three generations ago, one of the relatives of my maternal grandmother went by the name “Singer” Balaji. Anytime this name was uttered in the presence of someone who wasnt familiar with the name, both my mum and her mum would be quick to add, “not a singer but he worked in a company called Singer.”
On the way back home today, I saw a huge showroom of “Singer”, the tailoring machine manufacturing company. This was the first time in my life that I noticed this company which had so far only lived as a reference point to “Singer” Balaji. I was under the impression that the company, like many, had folded a long time ago, back when the world was still in greyscale.
I caught myself thinking about the fact that some people somehow get interesting names or abbreviations by which they’re called by other people. A friend from schooldays, who was called by the usual shortened firstname (eg. Jonathan -> Jon) through school, was suddenly “C.K” in the professional world. His colleagues (now ex-colleagues) knew him as “C.K”. “C.K” were his initials. Elsewhere, in the past that my mum remembers fondly, she was called “S.V” (her initials) by her colleagues and boss.
Perhaps because I grew up thinking that to have an abbreviated (like “K.B”) or a nominal prepend/appendage (like “Gemini” Ganesan) usually meant that you were someone popular and of the V.I.P cadre, I used to think one must be lucky or special to be regular folk and yet get such names.
When I spotted the “Singer” showroom, my mind wandered a little deeper and it struck me that what was more interesting and pivotal was that some random person - acquaintance, no doubt - decided to abbreviate or append a little something to someone’s name and call them with their invention. So, apparently, at work, the boss or some colleague called my mum “S.V” and kept at it. Eventually, everyone around her at her workplace started calling her “S.V”. And so, as is customary in the scheme of these things, you wonder: “what made someone start calling K. Balanchander (a legendary filmmaker in India) ‘K.B sir’ in the first place?”
Like Modi stealing the spotlight from Advani in the run-up to the prime ministerial berth before the 2014 elections, this random person became the object of import rather than the one who begot the new name.
Needless to say my thoughts went no further, very likely because my mind suddenly went meta, decided that this was something I should write about and started stringing words, coming short of what could’ve been a nice deep-dive.