From 'B. Manish' to 'Manish Bujranpally'

“Naam kya hai tumhara, beta?”
“B. Manish.”
“Yeh Bammanish kya naam hai?”
“Arey uncle, Bammanish nahi …. mera naam hai Manish… ‘B’ mera initial hai..”
“Acchha… yeh baat hai kya… “

This was a conversation between a non-descript uncle and me many years ago… I think it was probably around 17 -18 years ago… But, what’s so special about this conversation?? Well, for one, I was always very particular about my name being pronounced correctly…. Also, people who see me at first, often mistake me to be a Marwari… No offence in that… But it sometimes irks you when someone speculates about your background without proper enquiry…. Let’s leave this topic for some other article… Let’s come back to where we started…. My name…

Right from my childhood, I was very proud of my name… Manish… so fashionable, so modern when most of my friends had long old names…. That’s why this seven-year-old was ever so eager to reveal his name to everyone way back in 1990…. But there was a caveat to this whole issue… This guy was never comfortable with his surname…. Oh Man…. !!!! This surname is too big… too old fashioned… sounds like the name of a village… BUJRANPALLY… What the heck!!!... This was what I thought always as a kid… Since I stayed in a predominantly Marathi colony, I was always skeptical to reveal my surname when someone in the colony asked me about my “Adnaav” – Surname in marathi…

So, I decided that I would always call myself as B. Manish…. If someone asks about my surname I would say that I can’t pronounce it as it is too big… At that age, I thought this to be a master-stroke, a stroke of a genious because this strategy worked most of the times and no one bothered to ask me about my surname… I was very proud and happy on my intelligence… Also, since most of my classmates were Telugu people and as you know, many of Telugu people just use initial and rarely bother to use their surnames… This worked pretty well with me….

This reference as B.Manish continued for a very good time…. Up until my engineering 2nd year… B. Manish it was always everywhere… As my college mates would know, IT batch was the most notorious as well as famous as far as ragging was concerned… Oh yeah.. We kept on ragging juniors even in our 3rd year and 4th year… It was 3rd year 1st semester and one such day wherein I went to IT sub-junior batch‘s class and asked some totally petrified juniors to come with me… There they were… a couple of guys… half-a- dozen girls being escorted by me from 3rd floor to 4th floor…. Well, for people who don’t know much about our college, it is the great Deccan College of Engineering, a college in Hyderabad famous for everything except studies.. !!! It was a ‘magnificent’ six-storied building… Our class was on the 4th floor while the juniors were put up on the 3rd floor…

As soon as the juniors entered our class… Mere sabhi classmates un par toot pade… Not literally though… It was free-for-all… But somehow, I managed to bring a couple of girls and a boy near our set of friends… Pankaj joined me… Rajesh and Rajesh joined too… Kishore and Kishore came in from somewhere… Now, don’t think that I am typing names twice… Indeed, our class had two Rajeshs and two Kishores….!!!! Yaswanth, Kranthi and Satti were observing from a distance…. I was feeling very proud as though I had conquered the entire world…

As Pankaj asked the girls for BD, hey hold on.. it’s not the beedie used for smoking….it is BD for Bio-data… , one of the girls said that her name was Swetha Tadepally with the emphasis on Tadepally…. I couldn’t stop laughing… why the hell is she stressing on her surname… it is just another PALLY… typical telugu surname… but then whenever someone asked about her name she always used to stress on her surname…. I found this pretty funny… And the ragging went on for another 30 minutes or so and then they left..

Later after coming back home, as I sat thinking about nothing, something reminded me about the incident about surname in the morning…. I thought…What’s wrong with Bujranpally… It is a pretty good surname… yeah… I should be proud of it…. It is the name of my ancestral village and generally in Andhra Pradesh people have their village’s name as their surname… This made me think deeply about me, my family, my ancestors and finally my surname… I spent the rest of the day brooding over this...

A few days passed without much ado... Sometime later, a new lecturer joined our college and he was asking us to introduce ourselves… As he asked me about my name, I replied.. Manish Bujranpally… with the stress on BUJRANPALLY…. !!!!!!!