Once upon a time there was a protocol. Your full name had to reflect the ‘village’ you came from, the God/s that your family believed in, a few other Gods for luck, your birth star and your ‘given’ name etc. And to make the whole package more palatable someone invented the concept of initials.

So we lived in a society where M. L. N. S. C. V. Kumar (yes, that’s my name) would go around hobnobbing with a K. V. L. N. S. P. Raju and be known by easier names like Chinna and Pedda, depending. Of course the meaning of the initials were well known and people at large knew us as the Marur’wallu’ or as the Kanala’wallu’ and so on but  nomenclature was largely an initialised domain.

Perhaps the early migrants to foreign shores had to expand upon their alphabets but many of them made that option a purely offshore one – retaining their God given name (with full initial regalia) in India but shifting to expansions and short forms abroad.

It was in school (HPS, Begumpet) that I was christened ‘Marur Vijay’ and my signature to this date is a flourish of the same. It made it convenient to distinguish me from the M. Vinod who was a classmate. Why only a few of us were chosen to have our initials expanded is beyond me but M. Vijay became Marur Vijay, A. Arun Rao became Akin but C. Jai Kumar Gupta remained, and so did CJ Karira except for a few of us who chose to call him Chandu or something even more elaborate.

Around that time my sister experimented with calling herself Shailaja Dixit instead of M. Sailaja and borrowed from Dad’s name Deekshitulu to concoct a sufficiently ‘North Indian’ moniker. Maybe the fact that she studied in Nagpur had something to do with this phase in her life. But then she got married and became A. Shailaja Rao and that was that.

It was only in 1972 when I was filling in forms for college admission that I stumbled upon a first name, surname conundrum. I had a first name – Vijay, but damned if I had a surname. I had a whole string of initials that I could offer at the altar of any temple but I was not a ‘Reddy’, not a “Rao’ nor a ‘Raju’. So what was I.

The answer was obvious. I was a Marur.

And so I rebranded myself. And perhaps set in motion something that seems to have become an established trend, not just in the Marurs, but also the Virurus, the Kanalas and so on. Hey, I have no evidence to prove that I started it all, but there are indications to this effect and I am suitably proud.

So I became the first telephone subscriber with the name Vijay MARUR in the directory. And I became the first MARUR byline in newspapers and magazines. But by George, I was definitely the first Mr. & Mrs. Marur in quite a few social soirees.

Of course, the limited scope of creativity in the choosing of names meant that there were soon more than just one Vijay Marur or Sravan Marur but that was an acceptable price to pay for the honour of sparking off a trend. A trend that transcended immediate family boundaries and soon engulfed a host of first and second cousins (one of whom still extends me the courtesy of forwarding mails sent to vijaymarur@gmail.com).

Damn. It’s taken the better part of almost half a century but the brand has been built. It has become something of an identity. A small village near Anantapur is more than just the toll gate that it has now become. It is a global entity with a myriad dimensions. There is a Marur who is a font designer and actually has a font named after him. There is a Marur who will soon join the ranks of the highest echelons of the nation’s armed forces. There are quite a few Marurs who have painted their cards green. And the name has become a bit of a bond.

Of course I still need to figure out who say Madhu Marur is. There’s a friend request on Facebook I am saying yes to but I am doing it ‘blind’. He is after all, a Marur. Too.