Wednesday, September 14, 2005

what's in a name???

As I swiped my card today morning at the office entrance...i just happened to reflect upon the fact that names are of absolutely no use. cos when i swipe my card, all that the blinking light on the id recognition device gets from my swipe is the 8 digit employee number. When people want to contact me in office, they again know me as extension number so-and-so or cubicle number so-and-so. So why do i need to have a name ??

And this is not a phenomenon that starts at work. If you are an Indian, in all probability your parents would have decided a pet name for you long before you even made a grand-entrance in some sterile hospital room. And you would have carried the tag of 'Chunnu' or 'Baby' or 'Dolly' right through childhood and maybe even through your adult years. And all this after each member of you family spent days consulting the stars and 'google'-ing 'baby names' sites for naming you.

In school, it is the roll no or the id no that becomes your identity. Your friends have their own special ways of calling you...(There was a 'miss runny nose' and a 'miss funny voice' in my school too)
Even the teachers seem to call u by every other name except your own.."you there on the last bench"..."you there dozing in the corner"..blah blah !!!

On the net you are know by your IM-id or your email id (some of them are quite misleading...ever tried cool_dude@xyz.com or hot_babe@abc.com) !!
Or worse still whenever the people in the computer support team call me up... they insist on referring to me by my IP Address. And that makes me so mad...I could almost murder them !! But whats the point I would still be a mugshot with a number in the files and a number on a pinstripe background in the cells.

And the irony of the situation is that while im blogging this iam surrendering myself to the blog-name that in retrospect sounds very corny to me !! :((

Before my gray-cells (or whatever is left of them) decide to commit harakiri...lemme not think more on this !! i rest my case...cos i have no intentions of being a numbered headstone with some heart-touching words upon it...!!! :))

4 comments:

H.S. said...

This somehow reminds me of this - a rose by any other name is just as sweet;)) sumone was telling me this everbody is like a variable whose name assgnment keeps varying:P

Neelam Prabhugaonker Shetye said...

couldn't have put it better hems....perfect way to make a techie understand such things huh !!! :))

H.S. said...

oh!!so the new name u have for yourself is 'techie':))..well well, neelam the techie - sounds like an oxymoron;)

Neelam Prabhugaonker Shetye said...

'neelam the techie'...sounds almost as bad as 'dennis the chamathu kid' (oops..thats a bad one) anywayz..hope i've conveyed the overall idea :))

btw...thats not the name i have cooked up da..its something the "fourth estate" uses very generously to describe the victims of most muggings in banaglore !!:p
just kinda flicked it from them..harmless plagiarism i guess :)