Last month I paid a visit to my Kuladevi at Tirunageswaram, a village close to the temple town of Kumbakonam. Whenever I visited this temple, I also visited my native village Tepperumanallur, about 1.5 kms away. The village has completely changed in its looks and its inhabitants, but I still have a neighbor family living there. The two brothers are much older than me, but I do have memories of playing with at least the younger one during my sojourn at the village on summer vacations.
As has been the practice, after my temple visit I also paid a visit to this very warm and welcoming family. I have never been able to replicate the famous Kumbakonam degree coffee served by the lady of the house. Its lingering taste stays with me for days, so much so that I refuse to take coffee for a few days after and survive only on tea. As I was leaving and offered my obeisance to the elderly person, he insisted that I do the complete traditional ‘Abhivadaye’—the practice of introducing oneself or to establish one's identity to elders or gurus by giving one's full lineage and followership. My wife was taken aback and thought I was caught on the wrong foot, after earning all that praise from Sama Anna for my regular visits to the family deity. But thankfully, my memory cells stored those childhood learnings like an immutable Blockchain. I reeled off my complete introduction flawlessly—from Angirasa to Barhspatya, to Bharadwaja, to Pravaranvita, to the Bharadwaj gotra, and to the followership of Apastambha Sutra, and Yajurveda. The satisfaction on Sama Anna’s face was evident, and the relief on my wife’s face was just dripping.
In modern times, when I joined the Government Inter College in Kanpur—perhaps the only South Indian in the school—every time a new teacher took the attendance, he would raise his head from that long book and ask, “What does ‘R’ mean?” Thank God my parents didn’t name me Tepperumanallur Ramamurthy Mahesh. The short 45-minute period would have ended by the time they learnt to pronounce my name. Nevertheless, that name with an initial became my identity for the next 6 years in that school. I am sure the amazement would have been on a completely different level if some of my Telugu friends, with four-to-five-word prefixes and suffixes to their first name, had joined that school.
When I started working at Infosys, the main identifier was an individual’s email ID assigned by the systems group. There, an NS Babu became BABUNS, and a D Mukunda, by virtue of his mail ID—MUKUNDAD—became a "DAD" to everybody. With the popularity of godly names, the multiple Gopals, Srinivas', and Venkats were identified by their nicknames—like TNG to distinguish TN Gopal from other Gopals, MTS for an MT Srinivas, and KRV for a KR Venkat. The acronymic names became so fashionable that even a sweet and simple Prasad C was dubbed PC. So, when I was assigned the mail ID mahesh_r01, it was a new beginning for the organization. Names with the same initials posed a challenge to the systems group, and they started attaching numeric suffixes long before the Idea mobile network came up with ‘Kya Idea hai Sirji’. And just like that, I got to be known org-wide as R01.
And then the employee numbers in the organization grew manifold. The discussions moved from my humble 01 suffix to a colleague known as Amit_Kumar96. We realized the enormity of our growth only when the organization moved this Amit Kumar to our unit after absorbing 95 others before him. More of our colleagues with shared names, like Gaurav Gupta and Abhishek Sharma, got their suffixes in the 20s and 30s. But that was 15 long years ago. I am sure the current Amit_Kumar may have a 4-digit suffix, and the Gauravs and Abhisheks too would be in high 3 digits. They would have found other ways of identifying themselves, but I continue to own the pioneering, number-one position as R01. So, amongst my friends, I continue to hold the OG number-one position... until David Dhawan and Govinda show up at the August Kranti Maidan in Mumbai to stake their claim.
