I was going through my mail box and was looking at what weird names my various groups have...
There is "Gaonwaalon" my batch e-group...which has its origin in the days of a batch PG lab in Lonavala. In our first month at SP, we were taken for a Personality Guidance (PG) lab to a far remote place (HA!!!) called Lonavala. We were then split into three groups who named themselves various things . I ended up in a group called "Ahaaa" named so (not coz of pepsi - remember we were serious wannabe managers) coz we had heard so many times during our first few days our dean saying "the ahaaaa effect"...It was during a trek with this group in Lohagadh that our batch name was coined. When ever the whole team would slow down in the trek, one of my enterprising batchmates would scream "Gaonwaaaaaloooooooon...Aakraman" and the whole team would sprint 500 m without stopping, much to the bemusement of the facilitators, who gave up trying to analyze us for some time. So thats why i dont get mails from a group boringly called SPJPGP2003 or some such equally nauseus name, but from gaonwalon@......com :-) I love my global village!!!
Next is my own personal junta ka group who have kept in touch over mail and fone in the past three years. This was the gang which kept each other sane through boring autumn projects. Six non-delhi-ites stuck in NCR for two months on projects. Most of the said six were vela for most of the said 2 months!!! One in Faridabad (me), four in Noida (Abhi Sudhir Kau and Addy), Two in Gurgaon (God) ...We met everyweekend in one of the three happening places - Dilli, Sector 15 in F'bad or Sect 18 in Noida...We did the tourist thing by doing a trip to the Taj and Mussoorie and stacked spiritual points up by the dozen by visitin Mathura, Haridwar and rishikesh. I just realized that for a extremely irrelegious (to the point of irreverance) kinda person, i have probably seen more temples post this self confessed irreverance!!! Anyway, cutting a long story short, we came up with a name for our group on a phat-phati ride from Dilli border to F'bad at midnight, when we were foolish enuff to think Dilli was a safe place, and i was dropped at my guesthouse by my poor friends "en-route" to Noida!!!! Since none of us stayed in Dilli, we coined "Outskirters" as the term which we still use in all our mailing sprees. But a name like that obviously didnt escape my one track mind - i did point out that had we all stayed in dilli, we wud have been called inskirters which, well, kinda sucks...
Then my favourite and oldest group...my ethi days group. We use it for our egroup. We use it in our mails to collectively refer to a bunch of ppl who despite being spread across the diversity of the first, middle and last benches of the class still managed to get along well and still stay in touch. And today are geographically across two continents. Anu n Anu anand in the US...Deepa in chennai, hyd and soon to be germany...Anitha , Laks and Gil in Chennai...Lavanaay a.k.a. the daag in blore, soon in Philly...Me in blore, ocassionally in other third world countries. The group name was derived courtesy me n the daag (basically me coz the daag wouldnt have dared to do this) who traversed the same route on 19M for three years. This route took us through an now infamous theater called Pilot which started as a decent place (i actually saw baby's day out here) and now (donno if it still exists) screens films of dubious distinction (ok. it screens cheap porn)... We saw the theatre deteriorate in the three years. And it became good timepass for us to start observing the movie names...dont remember a lot of it now, but we began our day with movie names like "The huntress" "Thirsty for blood" etc. One such title towards the end of the third year eventually ended up being my egroup name ... Thats the genesis of Killergirls!!! As i told Anu, thank the lord i chose that for our group name...the next change in the theatre was "Virginhunters" - Wonder if we could have ever lived THAT down!!!
Speaking of names. Couple of my friends have had children recently. And the names chosen: A boy got named Saket and the girl Naeshaa. When i enquired, was told that the former means "Ayodhya" (remember Saket Ram of Hey Ram fame???) and the latter means "Pure" in Afro-american. But cant help wondering. If these kids ever get caught in any school with a south indian populace, Socket and Nai (dog in tamil) will probably have miserable childhoods. Unless they have inherited their respective parents' superb sense of humor!!! Makes you think life does come full circle. From naming kids atrociously unpronouncable names like "Abithakuchalambal" and "Pichaikani" and the like, we have graduated to shorter and sleeker names but with equally disastrous results. Heres wishing Saket and Naesha the very best in their lives!!!
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