July 23, 2013
My name is Jimmy. Now you may say, “Yes, of course, your name is Jimmy. So what’s the big deal?” Look here my friend, it is not only just a big deal, but it is a very, very big deal!! Do you hear? It simply isn’t any other simple common name, one could just walk over at will and trample. I hope you understand that? I do value it a lot, as there is a lot of sentiment attached to “Jimmy” – my name.
For your kind information, you know it is the name of a human being, the noblest creation on this mother earth where all of us spend a “little week”, a transient moment, during which time, we try to amass wealth, gold, diamonds, land, and then fight over it and even commit murders, and then one sad day we leave everything behind and dissipate into oblivion not to be heard any longer??
You may again ask, “So, what’s the big deal?” and then you might as well go on crooning what Juliet, in Romeo and Juliet had said, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.” Of course my name is sweet, it is very sweet. But why do you trample over it, why do you defile it and that’s where you are wrong?
My friend, you do not realize my problem at all. Why don’t you listen to my grouse for a short while – oh, thank you, thank you indeed for your valuable time. Now please sit and listen.
You see I value my name a lot and so does my wife Marjorie. Right from the beginning she has cultivated this good, mutual friendship by making my name “Jimmy” more tasteful and equally musical to the ear by calling me “Jimmu”. Isn’t that very sweet of her to do that? Not to be out down, I in turn gave her name “Marjorie” a twist by amiably naming her “Maju”. But I didn’t add any other additional Konkani tag such as “moga” “ma’, ‘bala’ or whatever. It would be a bit of going overboard which I wouldn’t like to do.
Our little flat in Mumbai, during the early stages of our married life, incessantly resounded with these pretty musical chimes to the horror and chagrin of the recently married couple next door. Quite ironically, despite being a newly married couple, the lady next door had a fight almost every other day with one or the other of the neighbours in the entire building of 8 flats, and the husband in turn fought with her every other day or two. They never called each other by the suffixes of “mu” and “ju” as we did, but they had some very loud and very wild Konkani suffixes such as “go” and “re” “dukore”, “mogorle” or whatever and they had even variety of prefixes too to boot.
Now let us come back to the grouse about my name being trampled about.
You see when I was a junior citizen, my wife would often call out to me in the morning and say “Jimmu, please go and get milk from Ramu’s shop.” I would take this opportunity to do a bit of running about in the morning and return from the shop with the milk. As things moved on smoothly, you know what happened one fine morning as I was running towards Ramu’s shop? A tall, stately young lady in a spotless white sari like some fairy’s child was walking not so far ahead of me and she called out “Jimmy, Jimmy,” Now, please, you only tell me, which “junior citizen” would resist such sweet overtures coming as they did from such a stunningly glamorous lady and that too calling you by your very own name – “Jimmy, Jimmy,”? I had to do as any other person in my position would do, unless of course he is some creature from another planet.
I thought she must be a familiar person and stately as she was, you can very well fathom how I was driven towards her after hearing my name. I straightaway looked at her. I was completely befuddled as she held me with her fiery eyes and with her cryptic outburst blurted out at me quite staccato, “I haven’t seen you before!”. As she thus spoke to me, I was even more baffled when she again crooned, “Jimmy, jimmy”. Wonder of wonders, my eyes soon fell upon her little poodle a few meters away, lifting one of its’ legs and relieving itself on a roadside plant. Totally crestfallen, I rushed back to my wife from Ramu’s shop and narrated to her the entire episode. She simply laughed at the whole matter and asked me not to be bothered about what had transpired.
However, subsequently having seen my name being so very popular among the canine species, I tried to discard “Jimmy” and replace it with various other names. I saw that names with suffixes of “Baba” tend to be quite lucrative as I saw them on T.V. programmes, but that would be a disregard to my fellow men as I would be simply holding on to that name without professing, I buried that idea and zeroed in on “Prem Sagar” in place of “Jimmy” as I feel it to be quite an apt name to be named after me for there is plenty of love in the name – ocean of love - as it is in me too and am waiting for my wife’s approval with no luck to date.
Let that be as it may but would you please, therefore, think of my plight before you name any of your pets after my name “Jimmy” for I am really possessive of it, no matter how many human beings possess my name, they are all my own fellow brothers and I love them as I love myself.
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