I ALWAYS consider my name Aravamudhan is an unpronounceable name in a place like New Delhi. I have been living here for the last 20 years and except a handful of people no one is able to pronounce this typical Tamil Iyengar name. Often one can see
people in North India dismiss even small and easy pronouncing south Indian names with contempt, but a name like Aravamudhan – which is a tongue twister even for many from south India – doesn’t even exist.
However, I have seen people who know Tamil and admire its bhakti literature praise my parents for having given me this name, but of course, this is not an everyday event. Whenever people meet me they struggle to pronounce my name, but I quickly help them before they disfigure it but, equally, I make it a point of telling them that it’s a pure Tamil name for Lord Krishna. When call centre staff make unsolicited calls on the mobile phone and murder my name in broad day light it angers me no end, but what else can I do!
I have tried several combinations to make it sound simple and easy to pronounce, but I have failed. In 1998, an Anglo-Indian colleague of mine came to my rescue. She coined a new name with just three letters. She chose ’Aru’ taking into account that these three letters appear in the original version and from then onwards I’m known to my friends as "Aru". Now even my relatives in Chennai call me "Aru"!
The other day a colleague of mine rang to share an interesting anecdote involving my name. He said he was calling from outside a cinema hall where he was watching Kamal Hasan’s new blockbuster "Dasavatharam".
As the story develops the police officer, who is on the trail to catch an alleged terrorist, meets an elderly woman to inquire about a parcel she has received from his son named Aravamudhan in America. Like everyone else in real life the police officer too finds it
difficult to pronounce the name. The scene was simply hilarious. Not only that Kamal uses my name in the song sequence "mukunda mukunda...".
Watching all this and unable to restrain himself, my colleague, who was amongst the audience in the cinema hall, instinctively shouted "Aru" aloud as if he wanted to solve the pressing problem of how to pronounce this difficult name. On realising his folly as everyone was looking at him intriguingly, he left his seat in a jiffy and rang me immediately from his cell phone to inform me of the incident.
This encouraged me to watch the film along with the family and all of us enjoyed the movie. It seemed as if Kamal had filmed one of the day run-ins I have with people around me all the time.
Even at the risk of sounding pompous let me recall an incident. In 2001, I had a brief encounter with Kamal Hasan when he came to a recording of a BBC interview. In my enthusiasm I offered him home-made food when he was staying in a five-star hotel in the capital by sending a hand-written fax to his hotel room. The next day I received a hand-written reply from him in Tamil saying "thank you for the offer, but no need."
Recalling that incident after seven years now I feel sheepish but, anyway, thank you Kamal for making me popular even for that one minute!
