The Name Game

As I read the paper on Thursday, I was upset with a particular news. The headline read “Forest personnel raid Snake Shyam’s house”!

Why did they have to raid his home? What did he do that was so wrong?

Shyam was nursing two Bonnet monkeys and three Indian black turtles back to health at home. He had forgotten to inform the Forest Department that he had rescued them and was nursing them back to health in his house. That was his mistake.

Snake Shyam may not be a trained herpetologist but he has been rescuing, rehabilitating and educating the public about snakes for 41 years! And he has been doing it for FREE!

Shyam’s work with animals and his service to the city has culminated in our city naming a street after him. The city has even named the first ‘urban forest’ after him.

Why, then, did the Forest Department have to embarrass this man? Why couldn’t they call him or drop into his place and do him the courtesy of asking him what was going on?

The cynical me assumed that the snake catchers’ lobby was targeting Shyam. Snake catchers charge Rs. 250 – Rs.500 to catch a snake in a house, but Shyam does it for free, so my suspicion was legit.

When I enquired, it turned out the issue was with his name!

The Forest Department officials, like most Mysureans, know Snake Shyam, but they do not know Mirle Subbarao Balasubramaniam, which is Snake Shyam’s official name.

Someone reportedly informed the Forest Department that one Balasubramaniam had turtles and monkeys at home. The Department raided the place only to realise it was Snake Shyam’s house.

Life can be confusing and problematic when nicknames become more popular than real names. Sometimes, they are misleading, too. I had written about this a decade ago. Here is an excerpt.

There was a infamous young man named ‘Choori Loki’ (dagger Lokesh) in Mysuru in the mid-1990s. How he got this fierce and fear-inducing name is an interesting story.

When in college, all of us had heard of this supposedly rowdy named ‘Choori Loki’. He had a Marvel comics villain vibe to him. After all, he had ‘Choori’ (dagger) as his first name. Years later, we heard of his ‘origin story’.

Lokesh used to hang around with rowdy-type characters but was never one himself. One evening, a fight broke out between two groups, and Lokesh was caught in the crossfire. In the melee, by mistake, his rowdy friend knifed Lokesh’s buttocks.

Lokesh was rushed to the hospital with a bleeding bum. As he walked out of the hospital with bandages on his buttocks, he became the ‘butt’ of ‘buttock jokes’. Because he was stabbed with a dagger (choori), his friends named him ‘Choori Loki.’

So, ‘Choori Loki’ wasn’t the perpetrator of pain like his name suggested but, the victim! ‘Choori Loki’ also noticed the new-found respect the nickname had bestowed upon him and moved around like a cool, quiet assassin who could pull out his Choori and reign pain upon thee. He basked in that glory for a long time until the real story came out. By that time, he had left Mysuru.

There are numerous such names, from ‘Chirathe’ (leopard) Manju to ‘Kardi’ (bear) Balu from ‘Tiger’ Ramesh to ‘Cat’ Babu. All nicknames created in their younger days have now become their unofficially-official names.

They believe their name helps increase their recall value. Some of them are in politics and when their real names are published, they call our paper office the next day and request that their ‘business’ name be used.

Even our Kannada film stars have interesting prefixes to their names. There is the ‘Rebel Star’ Ambarish, his son Abhishek is now called the ‘Junior Rebel Star’. Then we have ‘Golden Star’ Ganesh, ‘Challenging Star’ Darshan and ‘Power Star’ Puneeth Rajkumar.

Additionally, some people are given their physical attributes as prefixes before their name, such as ‘Dhadiya’ Lokesh (giant Lokesh) or ‘Kari’ Naga (dark Nagesh). It may sound derogatory, but it’s just a name created for “recognisability.”