Itja Simblle Name...

It all started on a rainy Saturday afternoon when I was going downhill (I always am, but this time, altitudinally as well), when I saw this lorry parked near the football field. While its latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates are of little concern to the reader, much less its chromatic or ownership analysis, what I would like to lay emphasis upon is its nomenclature. I wonder who Dhul is and if he/she had the faintest idea of the million bucks the petitioner could have easily got on suing the owner of this beast of our wondrous attention, cos you see the beast was named ‘Dhulfucker’. I don’t swear in my posts, so you can see that this is 100% real. As real as Rio being chosen over Chicago in spite of the latter’s illustrious adopted son. On sighting this Shrek of the nomenclature world, the author’s eyes did two complete rotations vertically, such that the attic and its layers of grey dust could be seen with a high def resolution. I knew the lorry’s aesthetics did not demand a name like Miss World or Sweetheart, but this? And why Dhul? Who is Dhul? What did he/she do? One (un)intelligent guess is that when some cuts the lorry off on the highway, the driver doesn’t need to raise his hands nor an eyebrow. The name says it all on the rear-view mirror, even with the footnote “Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear to be”. You wouldn’t want the bed mate of Dhul breathing down on your neck, would you? Considering Dhul could be the auto driver who is sleeping peacefully with a sign above him that says “A true Christian, I was a virgin till I died.”

Another instance of an insane mallu name – Mambillies. It was the name of a shop on the way from Calicut to Mahe. Mambo and Ill? Maybe founded by a Cuban dancer who was taken ill with swine flu after the Bay of Pigs invasion? Or mamba and Billy? Did Bill, the snake catcher from Africa, found it? We wouldn’t know. And we would never find out cos the All India Malayalee Individual Single Shop Owners Association, MambiliPuzha village, Calicut district, might take offence and order a nationwide (vllagewide) hartal thereby holding up traffic for 2 hours. (Found an approximately 6 km long queue today waiting to receive some Red. Wonder what the issue was. Definitely not the state of highways since the children were positioned to align with potholes so that all you would see from a car is a continuous stream of faces at a particular coordinate in your window)

But the icing on the cake has to be the winner from near Palayam Bus stand. What do you call a chit fund that needs people to put in trust and money? Intelligent Brothers? Safe Hands? No. The mallu passion doesn’t die easy. He names it “Hillarious”. See the play of words? Not Hilarious, but Hillarious, possibly cos the place is surrounded by mountains where people can spend hard earned money(of others) in building a villa, name it “Happy Hilla” and disappear from public view forever. And they run an institute named “Hillarious Institute of Economic Studies”. You pay your admission fees imagining a fat, round, jocund professor who winks when you pass and winks otherwise also, cos his other physical movements have been restrained by a 5 inch layer of blubber lining. The fun starts when he ends up looking like Tantri the Mantri, and you see him only once in stationary, while collecting fees, and the next time waving at you from the back of a white Ambassador (Austerity in swindling is Mallu principle) while you look through teary eyes and exclaim the last name of a particularly familiar lorry. But you have to admit, the mallus are changing. They have taken up this issue seriously and have decided through the All India Kerala Baby Name Book Publisher Union that henceforth all names should sound proper. So now, make way for the new generation - Filcyrani, Amblikumar and Byjukuttikanthan. Namaskaram!