What's in a name?

It has always been a source of amusement to me, the way teams have been named in the Indian Premier League. Mumbai decided to call themselves Indians, as if the rest of us are from Swaziland or Burkina Faso. Delhi decided to call themselves Daredevils, maybe due to Akshay Kumar's presence and Deccan in a fit of inspired thinking triggered by V.V.S Laxman's running between the wickets,called themselves Chargers.

Amidst all this sea of really "innovative" name keeping,Chennai went with Super Kings. Being an avowed Chennai fan, I was obviously curious. People bandied about various reasons and prominent among them were:

1) It's an indirect homage to the superstar of Tamil Cinema. ICL did steal a march by calling themselves Chennai Superstars, and hence the Chennai IPL team had to resort to this. One team I thought had got it perfectly right were the people behind PHL(Premier Hockey League),
who named the hockey team Chennai Veerans (Madurai Veerans would have been even better).

2)Super is an extremely important Madras baashai word. When I came to Madras in 1993, after having spent the first 8 years of my life in New Delhi, this was one word that I noticed kept recurring in everyone's lingo. People had to keep saying "Super a iruku","Machan Super da", and ultimately it entered my lexicon too without much hesitance one should agree.

And with the logo being that of a Lion, it could possibly be a sum of the two and hence Super + King(s).

It was when I read Business Line yesterday that I found the reason behind the naming of the franchise. Apparently, the 2 most popular brands of cement that are manufactured by India Cements, who own CSK are Coromandel Super and Coromandel King.Thus, Super King(s).

I never thought on these lines, thought it seems to be a brilliant idea, but why this was not publicised by India Cements really beats me. Generally, no one is too bothered about cement ad's, but this was one serious way of increasing brand recall.

PS:
If you don't remember Coromandel King flip your mind again, that construction site, those sacks with the spade imprint, that labourer in yellow colour jersey(CSK jersey colour btw), ahh.. yes finally you remember. Wonderful !!

Trivianomics

I kept taking notice of the fact that during a point in the Beijing Olympics, Michael Phelps had more medals than the rest of the US squad put together.

Until, another startling piece of trivia came my way, only 4 countries have a population greater than that of Uttar Pradesh .

Bolt from the Blue Carib

The 100m dash has always made me wonder, why the most prestgious gold medal also takes the least time to win. Maybe it is the thing they call Need for Speed.

Anyway, the winner was a Jamaican very very aptly named Usain Bolt. Bolt could possibly be the most apt surname for a sprinter, but with another tinker we could make it even better.

"Usa"in Bolt --> "Usa"out Bolt

King Midas Reincarnated

Mythological tales are generally fantasies, which people concoct to imagine things which would normally not happen in reality. But there are times, when strange things happen and one is linked to the story of a king named Midas.

It is said that whatever Midas touched turned into Aurum (Ancient name of Gold, and Midas was an ancient king, get the drift ?). This tale though hard to believe has finally been repeated in real life by a gentleman(fish?) from Baltimore, Maryland named Michael Fred Phelps .