If I roughly calculate the time I spent on thinking in my whole life, at least 30% of it would be spent on my name. But the perception of this thought would differ in many ways like, How cool is my name ? , Is my name really cool ?, Do I like my name or hate it ?, Would it be nice if I had another name ?,etc., So when I shared some of these in the class as my speech, every one liked it. So I'm modifying it as a blog post and posting it here.
As most of you know, my name is 'Tamilnambi'. Most of the time I had to repeat my name twice or thrice for people to understand it. Even though only half of them would get it right. Especially the guys who take pizza order via phone, never get my name correct. The name on the bill would be a different one, after going through some permutation combinations. Last time, the name on the bill was 'Tamil Nadu' !
However, Nowadays I don't get mad when people find my name difficult to understand or pronounce. The reason might be I learnt my responsibility to explain them when they are wrong or I just got used to it. When I was in school and college, my friends used to make fun of my name (some of them still do it), by calling me with names like 'English Nambi', 'Hindi Nambi',etc,. If I get angry for that, they argued with me why there can't be names like these, when there can be a name like 'Tamilnambi'. But how the hell am I supposed to know that ? I didn't start this trend of naming everything like 'Tamil...'. We can justify it by saying that we love our language more and doing this to show it. But other people also love their language and they don't show it in this way. So, is the mistake on our Tamil people for their obsession with Tamil language or is it on others for not obsessed enough to come up with names like these ?
When it comes to the adults (including my teachers ), they always think that they are are very smart and ask me " Whether you trust Tamil or Tamil trusts you ?" (they took the meaning as 'Tamil' + 'Nambi(belief)'). This question always irritates me, because I don't like people who chop my name and reshuffle it the way they like and ask silly questions about it. It also irritates me why people always to this my name, when they don't have any issues with other names like 'Ramesh', 'Suresh', 'Rajesh', etc,.
However, for all those who don't know the real meaning of my name, 'Tamil' not only signifies the language but also the people who speak it and where they live. And 'Nambi' means a leader or a king. So literally my name means A king or a leader to the Tamil people.
Other than this pride, my name also has some extra advantages. For example, because of its uniqueness, I never have difficulty in finding my name in any list. If there is a Tamilnambi in the list, then definitely that would be me. And while creating online accounts, I never face problems like 'username not available'. Go to any social networking sites like twitter, facebook, Google+,etc and search for 'Tamilnambi'; my account will be the first one in the search results. In fact, you can easily find me in google too. I'm the second most popular Tamilnambi in the world, thanks to my hundreds of friends in facebook and followers in twitter. The first Tamilnambi was a lyricist who wrote devotional songs. So my life aim is to beat him and capture the No. One place.
So after all these research about my name, if someone ask me now that what is the most special thing about me, I have the perfect answer for them. It is 'My Name'.
