The Return of the "RAJ"

You can still find the traces of British Raj in India even after the Britishers left in 1947. There are skeletons in every cupboard in a government department. However, they are in a decline because the government does seem to do some work these days and the babus do open these cupboards once in a while and the skeleton fall off and is lost or in case of computerisation of departments, thrown along with the cupboard and bound to a fate of never to be opened.

 

However, a new form of the Raj is back. It is the obsession of every Indian male living overseas (and probably in India too) to shorten his name to Raj. I do not understand why this obsession, but just about everyone wants to be called Raj. The various names that have taken the abridged form of Raj include some bizarre and crazy ones.

 

Here are a few (and these are all I have known or come across):

• Rajat as in Rajat Raina or Rajat Gupta
• Rajesh as in Rajesh Jain or Rajesh Khanna
• Rajiv as in Rajiv Pant or Rajiv Gandhi
• Rajeev as in Rajeev Motwani or Rajeev Bhatia (aka Akshay Kumar)
• Rajkumar as in Dr.Rajkumar or Dr.Rajkumar
• Rajendra as in Rajendra Shrestha or Dr.Rajendra Prasad
• In fact even the Raju that you find in almost every street corner in Andhra is now calling himself Raj, which incidentally is the surname/title (like the Rao's and Reddy's) and not really the name!!!

The attempts by certain colleagues in the US to make one Rajy, which is a short of Rajyalakshmi, to Raj was met with an immediate correction that it was indeed Rajy and prefers to be called so and not Raj (only to be called Georgie the next time :)).

 

This really is the return of the "Raj". And it does scare you (when I first saw Raju shortened to Raj, trust me, it did scare me).

 

Note 1: In case you have not figured it out. All the first instances of names I have given as examples are the ones that came up when I did a search for those names on the internet and clicking on the results led to a proper website and not a dead URL. The alternate names are those of famous personalities to have donned that name. Except that in case of Rajkumar the first search result was of the famous kannada actor Rajkumar. In case you forgot, he is the same actor whose death led to violent scenes in B'lore, which only amused people living outside Bangalore, because they couldn't relate to the violence (or Rajkumar).

 

Note 2: Some might argue that I was wrong in putting Rajeev Bhatia next to Rajeev Motwani because Rajeev Motwani deserves to be treated the same way as Rajkumar (famous enough to be allowed to stay on his own) but Rajeev Bhatia being a lesser known of a famous Bollywood star, I thought let me impart a bit of a trivia to the inane readers here.

 

Note 3: In case you were wondering, Rajeev Motwani is a professor at Stanford and I think the professor who funded the first servers in Stanford university campus to host the "back rub" project developed by the students he was mentoring.

 

Note 4: Rajendra could have also been Rajendra Kumar, the actor, but I preferred Dr.Rajendra Prasad the first Indian President, for sake of Bihari pride, so what if he was the president 60 years ago.

 

Note 5: So now you ask me what is "back rub"...go figure it out.

 

So are there any Raj's that you have seen return?