Friendship it is.. or is it

If you're still wondering why this post has such a title, it is because thats what people wanted me to write about. In particular one friend of mine (codename: FlowerGo) who is also jobless and waiting for work to start from Tuesday, wanted me to write about how wonderful it is to analyze our really good friendship over a very short period of time. But something tells me that before I ventured beyond three sentences, all you readers would be fast asleep and wouldn't depend on Benadryl shots or sleeping pills.

So today I thought I'd write something totally different from what I've written before. I thought I'd analyze a few nicknames. Nicknames are a funny thing. From being called as the unit of power (Watts) to having a hospital ward as part of my nick (Sriward) I've seen it all. In spite of my name not being the easiest to pronounce, I've not had it butchered by anyone here in the US, yet. Its always been my dear fellow Indians that have screwed it up. And then there was this friend of mine who was Under Influence and was totally into Lits (Literary events), so he came up with 'Vats the good word'. This would later on replace the event Whats the Good Word in one of our college cul-fests as well. And as you all know, it is also the name of my blog. Incidentally, this friend of mine is almost always addressed by his nick- Patti (Means dog in Malayalam).

Nicknames are something to cherish for life. I am sure every single person has a list of nicks that they accumulated over the course of their lifetime. It just takes some digging up from the memory and a trip down memory lane back to the college days, when you had all kinds of people around you who did not care to call you names (some of which are better left unsaid), which sometimes end up being nicks. Usually I was not the one who pioneered in coming up with nicknames for people. But with one particular nick-Rules, that I came up with for one friend of mine, I started enjoying it. Why the name Rules? This friend of mine had stormed into the railway station to send off one of our seniors in college and in the process had forgotten to buy a platform ticket. So she decided to be truthful and bought two tickets the next day she came to the station. I could not help but come up with this name for her.

As for how I got the name Sriward, well that one was a little weird. I would say that my school cricket team's coach had a serious hearing problem, and thus heard Srivats as Sriward and even wrote it down as that on the team list given to the umpires. So when they were calling out my name, it took a while for all the team members, including me, to realize who it actually was. The bigger irony is that this same coach of mine used to call me something that sounded like Si-ri-way-it.

I could keep on writing loads about nicknames, but I guess any longer and this could fill up one section of The Hindu Editorial page. The idea behind writing this one is to take all of you people back to those days where you were the victims or predators who coined silly/stupid/slick/dashing nicknames for the people around you.