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 !!