College Nicknames

REC days were fun with nicknames. if you dint have a nickname in , then it was sort of ' you are aloof ' not part of a close group. And once your nickname gets set, you are known only by that name even many years after you pass out. People can recognize you only by nickname sometimes and u end up saying their real names they might not recognize who this was..

And recently i met a couple of my seniors and was chatting with them and got so used to talking in nicknames that , accidentally i wrote to one of my juniors ask her to get in touch with some one - saying 'get in touch with loco' . she was bamboozled and called back to ask whose nick name is it and thats when i realised that in the flow , i had actually told my senior's nickname. Being a rectian , i know even he wont mind.

So that got me to this topic of nicknames. during my batch we had a lot of wonderful nick names espcially in my gang.. And your's truly happened to be the creator or populariser of amny of these names.. All these were formed accidentally.. and true to its history of nicknames, some that stayed with people even after 2003. even now some people are confused if i say the name

so here goes some of my nicknames - its my gang so they wond mind

the one that takes the cake , My roomie for 2 years and benchmate for 4 years Ganesh - K Mani which got formatted into Mani. the story behind the K cant be shared in a public forum.. even now he curses me for the name and all the 300 odd folks in Lapis pearl and ruby knew him as Mani

Next one is my other bench mate - Karadi - yes we had a kind of a mini zoo ... his thick beard earned him the name karadi

next one my roomie - marudu - Puli Pandi - Puli thank usha devi our first year physics teacher for yoru name. the person behind this name was Viritha - Vijay.. he came from virudhachalam to Virutha... on similar lines Kumba for Imaya as imaya came from kumbakonam. same stayed with murali - mannar coz he came from mannargudi.

ramesh - he was authoritative so Natttamai - got shortened to nats. one day a very active kumbas asks nats - nattamai un unmaiyana peru enna da.. thats was it.. incidentally ramesh elder brother studied with us , so by rule he became periya nattamai. his younger brother - Kutti Nattamai :D..

then came the man roopesh - Ooty beggar - got shortened to Ooty -- why ?? he used to walk around with a torn jean..

then comes ram - Bonda - he apparently got a proxy rose on 14th feb from opal - so became Bonda

Karthi was short - so chitra kullan , vivek - Bholla why- in the movie 5* there is a fat guy whose name is bholla, Seethu was called Andavayan. paulraj was known palrani ... mohan - chiyan

some other meorable names include Dollar , Boiler , Funda, deisel , baba.. these names stay even till date.

but we dint stay quiet we had nicknames for some staff and that was the best..

we were the notorious people from chem .. we could keep names :D. one of my profs was called mayandi , another thee chatti thalayan all these are courtesy raja.. the best was for one of the lab assistants - pambu Vayan( you all know who it is :D). the best was for a mech prof - he used to be called pura koottu thalaiyan.. a comp sci guy was called C mandaiyan ...

So embeded are these names in my brain as well as others that any day we sit round a table for a coffee we call all these names once.. these names are just from a gang of 20 people... there were 450 names... opening the REM book will remind me of those wonderful names and days..

So waiting for the next time i meet a big bunch of rec folks to call out those wonderful nicknames....