All the Names

Let me begin by telling you my real name. Its Riaan Mark Rodrigues. Mark is my middle name and is the name of one of the evangelists( 4 gospel writers). Rodrigues is a Portuguese surname which literally means "Son of Rodrigo" (Patronymic). Riaan is my first name. As for its meaning, well I was told as a boy by my mother that it is named after a Persian King(yes my parents decided to give me a Persian name as my mother also has one....actually my parents had come down to "Riaan" and "Rhys" but my uncle Robin felt that people would keep calling me "Greece" !!), which was really not a satisfactory answer ! So before my IIM interviews I remember trying to find out if there was a meaning. So I scrapped all the active "Riaan"s on orkut to find out if they knew the meaning. Unfortunately just one sort of did. Apparently "Riaan" is also a derivative of "Aryan". Anyway so that's all about MY name !!

Needless to say, Riaan Mark Rodrigues as a combo is very intriguing to most people. A lot of people have a problem pronouncing my name. My first name for instance has been turned into a "Ryan", "Rian", "Rehan" etc and well, lets not get into pronunciations...I had a south Indian professor once who would call me "raiyan" !!A lot of people prefer to call me "Rodrigues"...given the apparent complex pronunciation of my first name....but then there are those that have trouble with all the names....I remember this one occasion during my school days when I had to go to some public school to take an Olympiad exam or something. When the time came for the supervisor to take attendance, he called everyone's names....but at mine he stopped..." Rai...Ree....errrmmm rodree...rod...rodddd no 23 are you there ?"...yup i was number 23 that day !!

So I spent my life being called all sorts of names...yes without actually being insulted !! as for the derivatives plenty but most came later...in school it was just "Rod Dick" !! yeah....and to make things worse ...my first hotmail id was riaanrod7@hotmail.com, the implications of which didnt hit me at that time till one day someone came up to me and said.."Riaanrod7 huh..really?? 7?"...so the names and their derivatives kept coming till i came to WIMWI. That's when things just exploded !

Now on registration day in the first year, I was asked to fill up my name as it appeared on my certificates. In Bombay university, our names appeared in this format surname-name-middle-father-mother. Why they needed all these names I don't know, but they did, and to make things worse, the PGP office registered me with all 5 names rather than trying to make sense of it. My name tag had all 5 names, so did the attendance sheet and so everytime the prof decided to take the roll call, it was a riot at my turn...some called me by my first name, others by my surname some wanted to read out all 5. I had to shout present really loudly before they reached the second name !!, still do infact ! Furthermore, the computer centre also refused to figure things out and I was too lazy to sort it out. At wimwi ur email and dbab(internal chat) ids are year-name-Initial of Surname. So I should have been 7riaanr but Noooooo !! I became 7rrml !!yes 7rrml !! they missed out my mother's name ! So 7rrml became the joke of wimwi...and quite frankly I like the name 7rrml (I mean its different and yes I like to be called 7rrml and not rrml)...but it was a big problem for the previous placecom. The dbab id is in some way a primary key and is used often to sort of people's names. So in my case they had to sort out a Rodrigues Riaan Mark Leonard Rayna with a 7rrml !! definitely was a big pain !! oh and I almost forgot, the office also mispelt my name as Rian !!....so from 7rrml came rrml and sometimes I would even have the PGP office calling me mlrr. The batch even made it mltr (which is incidentally also one of my fav bands). The PGP continues to blunder on this front..sometimes the attendance sheet has the other 4 names with my name Riaan reduced to an initial !, at times there isn't enough space and Rodrigues is made rodrig ! For those of you who read my blog, you would know I have yet another name ...Chuchcha Singh !! yes my dorm name (explained in an earlier post)..and from Chuchcha Singh came another derivative...Chooch !...well that's it for now...those are all my names !!

If some of you haven't noticed, the number 7 keeps repeating ....well, when I decided upon my email ids (hotmail and current yahoo )...it was chosen because as a football fan the number 7 holds a special place. A lot of my fav players wear that number and so I used it in riaanrod7@hotmail.com and futebol_riaan7@yahoo.co.in. As for the IIMA id, the number 7 denotes the year that I joined...uncanny isn't it (I am also born in July)....so I figured that Seven should be the name of one of my kids...yeah seven. For those of you who watch Seinfeld, you would know that George also thinks really highly of this name ! As for a middle name ...was thinking something exotic and cricket related(the whole Indian connection)..so I came up with "White Lightning" !! yes one of my fav fast bowlers and a native American (Indian) name !! So there it is ...my Kids name will be Seven "White Lightning" Rodrigues !! The tradition shall live on !

The renaming of Riaan Rodrigues !!

Wheeew...its been such a long time since ive blogged....good lord !!!!.....well its now almost 4 weeks into lectures at WIMWI....and its been one hell of an experience so far.....I am btw, in Dorm 'unnees'...well most dorms are known out here as D1 or D6...etc....mine is spsd to be a desi dorm so it is called just 'unnees'.....and yes i'm on the new campus...which means bigger rooms...less insects(ie few mosquitoes.... :D)....and being closer to the classrooms......got a nice bunch of tuchchas in my dorm....pretty helpful chaps......Now I must introduce you to another WIMWI tradition.....the dorm name.....well guys this is really serious stuff....out here at WIMWI, we are not known by our real names.....well very few of us are....we get something called dorm names....its the resposnibility of our tuchchas to give us our names....just to explain to u how serious this thing is...well....if u guys have ever read articles abt former HLL chief MS Banga in the papers...u would notice that they normally print it as MS 'vindi' banga.....well vindi is his dorm name....and he is still known as vindi in corporate circles!!!......now like i told some of u guys before i left....every dorm has its own culture(like my desi dorm)...and with it come traditions....its a tradition of unnees to name the fachchas..."xyz " Singh...yeah my dorm is the only one that dishes out a surname( it is and always will be 'singh') as well....and the name will be one that serves no other purpose than embarassment !!!....infact the entire campus eagerly awaits the naming ceremony of the unnees fachchas every year!!!.....so lets cut to the chase......my dorm name is ...brace urselves.....ready......."Chuchcha Singh" !!!....yeah yeah laugh ur guts out.....but its certainly better than what some of my fellow dormmates got.....sussu singh, potty singh, khada singh, nirodh singh, orgy singh, semen singh, tevadia singh ( shainu u shud get this one),....etc :D....


neway guys i guess ill wrap up here...below are some photos...keep visiting this space for more stuff....





A shot from my dorm.......rgt opposite is dorm 22....the row of buildings on the right are the classrooms/seminar rooms....each building has one classroom on the frst flr and a seminar room on the grnd flr....



.... of Unnees !!

...and from my balcony......you can see the entrance to the undergrnd tunnel in the left bottom ....we gotta take it to get to the new campus.....its goes under the road u see in the pic.....the tower in the rgt top part of the pic is on the old campus....u can also the wall of the new campus.....

Adios Bombay...well just for now !!!!

Wheew...its been so long since I have blogged...even though I have well...been ..."Jobless"..for the last 2-3 weeks, there have been the loose ends that i have had to tie up.....the bank work, the attestations, the last minute shopping,the reordering of all my documents, the goodbyes and the dinners that go along with them. Its been a boring(well the dinners werent boring... :D ) but not empty 20 days.....
I leave for gujjuland on the 19th....yeah just a few more days.....cant wait to walk around the Louis Kahn plaza, to spend my first day in the dorm.....
This is certainly gonna be an experience of a kind for me.....its the first time I will be away from Home for sooo long.....yeah I get to keep my room as dirty as I want :P , can sleep late...can live like a real "Bachelor".....ofcourse I will be leaving family and friends back, but its just 2 yrs...and like I said it wud be a different experience.....and ofcourse I almost forgot..WIMWI has a Bball court, tennis courts, baddy courts....TT tables(plenty of them), a football grnd and a crkt grnd.....oohhhlala !!...just one prob...acc to our seniors we wont have the time to make full use of them, yeah acc to them, the only thing for a fachcha(frst yr student at WIMWI) to do is to to "magoo". When I met them at the IIMA meet at Bombay, I was askin them how much time we wud get to play everyday....and one of them just gave me that look...u know..the one that says "You poor ignorant bugger !!!!..You are just like me one yr ago...all hopeful, all excited.....they r gonna eat u up alive.." and he just said sympathetically," Well, it depends on your time management.." I mean, seriously these guys were tellin us that they study for at least 8-9 hrs everyday.......I can understand doin it for one day when there is a lot of pressure on you...but everyday!!!!...its scarin the crap out of me !!!
All the same I am really lookin forward to the WIMWI experience keep checkin this place for info on it :P ......next post in Ahmedabad !!
Cya guys !!

They found me !!!!

Well, for the first part of the blog, I'll let the picture do the talking.....


Glory, Glory Man Utd !!!

ok...now to the other half....Ladies and Gents...I have been discovered...Remember that post abt all the crazy stuff I did as a kid and abt how I have to hear abt that all the time at family functions....
Well, it just so happened that my uncle Conrad decided to search the internet to find out what his notorious nephew was upto and wala!!...google returned by blog page !!!! and more importantly it returned that very post abt how the family keeps reminding me of my behaviour as a kid.....so on Saturday during a dsilva meet....I not only had to contend with the usual horrifying flashbacks but also with the family discussing my blog entry on the very same thing !!!
I really need to be careful abt my posts now.. :P

The First Bihari !!!

In the beginning, the land of Kings, of the Buddha and of learning lay in peace. Men loved their women, women loved their shopping and the Gods as usual didn't give a hoot. But Loki the God of mischief looked down and saw that all was not good.Loki realised that he needed to send down a conman, a trickster, someone in his own likeness(not image) to save the people from boredom.So he picked up some clay and fashioned a man..stout, with the hair of Diana ross and a brain that can be described as relatively brilliant. Loki looked at this man he called Einstein and realised he was not what he wanted."We will send you to Facist Germany...that should be fun!!" he said and with a puff of smoke Einstein vanished and crashed into the fatherland. Then Loki again set to work, but he made a few mistakes....there was an arnold that he cursed never to be back, there was Ross who he cursed to marry a lesbian and an Arab sheikh who he cursed never to think!!!...but finally it came out right ....just as he wanted...he was brown,had hair that could never be combed, a belly of a laughing Buddha and the wit to charm the ignorant...that was it...Loki looked at him and said," You are the chosen one. You shall save my land from boredom
and predictability. From now on you shall be called Laloo...and you shall be...the first BIHARI."

Laloo was born into the Prasad family and therefore came to be known as Laloo Prasad.His childhood was a very normal one...punctuated though with acts of brilliance...like the time when he left his family at the age of twelve to contest in the annual cow milking festival in Patna. The elders were astonished with his speed and the skill with which he charmed the
animal....legend has it that he used something he called "orbait whaait" to do the same....

When Laloo reached the age of 40 he knew the time had come....his gaurdian trickster Loki had appeared to him 5 years earlier and had given him the effort estimation of the creation of Bihar...it was to begin when he was 40...and was to take 7 days...
So Laloos first act was to create BAST( Bihari Accepted Standard Time)..which incidentally he thought was the spelling for Best. By the standard, 1 year of IST was to be converted to 1 day of BAST. Now Laloo had 7 years to erect Bihar !!!

Laloo woke up one fine morning and rushed to the back of his house where the bulls and cows were. And Laloo said.." Go forth and Multiply.." and the cows continued to chew their cud...another looked at bulls and slid onto the hay.....so Laloo took out his can of Axe and sprayed the Deo all over the bulls and within minutes....well...too graphic to describe....u know what i mean....( any young boys/girls readin this go home and ask ur parents what happened..). So within a year the streets of Patna were teeming with bulls...here a Moo..there a Mooo...everywhere a Moooo MOooo.( Now we know where the term bullshit was
coined)The first part of his triple-headed mission was complete.

In the second year(day accordingto BAST)..Laloo was sitting under a tree when one of crows crapped on him...he knew it..it was another sign from Loki...He had to find a staple food for his people. He searched long and Hard the whole day(IST)...but nothing ...nothing was good enough and he finally collapsed on the ground near what the locals called a paan shop.. It was owned by a man called Nitish Kumar.... Nitish handed Laloo some paan and Laloo beamed with delight..."Come...follow me and I will make you rich...This will be our staple." said Laloo..So Nitish and Laloo opened paan shops at every nook and corner of Bihar..and from there...paan shops went to Bombay, Delhi, Lucknow....etc..Lalism was spreading !!
The second part was completed just under 2 years(IST).

But Laloo wanted more power...how else could he shape Bihar according to Loki??...how else could he establish the Third Wreck?? He had read about "Robain Hoood" and wanted to emulate him....what a noble idea he thought...rob from the rich and give the poor...but he wanted his own mark on it...Laloo had to be written all over it...so was born extortion. And thus Laloo and his men became rich....Extortion was hailed by the communists as a great economic leveller..Laloo was getting stronger politically !!

By the fifth year(IST)everything had fallen into place....people abducted bulls, men extorted from the rich paanwalas and Loki was rolling in laughter...Laloo smiled as he looked on...after all he had completed his task 2 days early !!!

PN: Laloo went on to become chief minister of Bihar...one of the first things he implemented was BAST. There is a story about him marrying a certain Rabri that has been debated all over India...Infact one story says that he and Rabri had many kids...who are still protected by the Municipality of Patna...to ensure that anarchy continues in Bihar !!! Only his trusted henchmen ..the gundaas of Ranchi know this secret.(also known as the secret of the Bullshit.)

[the above story is not intended to make fun of people from any part of India.......I hope the readers of this post see the funny side of it all....]