#handlestory

Twitter is a channel fraught with a lot of arrogance....

I too started off on a similar note as @zenemotions, nearly a year back. But soon outgrew trying to being smart-alecky and pseudo-intellectual all the time. Also, I was slightly disturbed with the way social networks today are creating a parallel virtual world, and an unreal alter-ego for all of us. So, I switched off for a few months, and spent a rejuvenating, quality 2011 with a lot of old friends and family.

At the end of the day, all Indians at their core have similar insecurities, sense of humor and need for acceptance. Out of this thought, was born the idea to become a handle which in it's most basic form, stands for what REAL desiness is all about.

So, here I return in a female, grunge avataar as the queen of trolls, the universal emblem of every Indian household's fantasy. My name is Bai...KaamwaaliBai.

Jugaadu, moofat and without any pretence, Kaamwaalibai is here to entertain, get entertained and sweep out some skeletons from your dusty cupboards. To all those interested in my real identity - I'm a Mumbaiite, currently based out of Dubai, working as a regional marketing manager in a global MNC. And, sorry to break the hearts of all you salivating Shiney Ahujas and KRKs on my TL, I am a full-blooded straight male!

So, see you back online with my broom in one hand, and a dropping pallu in another... *moooaah* to all the nawty babalog and hawty babysaa!

Never thought a handle could be so important. Never thought my handle could become my new identity. Never thought people would call me more by my handle than my name. It does create a whole new image for you. Here i was thinking about what to change my handle to, from the obvious @ankitakanabar.

Though always wanted a handle that could describe me. That could give people an idea about who i am, what i am. And suddenly 2 names came to me. Chocolate Fantasy and Littlemissmuffet. Co-incidently both these names were given to me by a friend, best friend who i called Meetha dil :) I do think i am so much like Chocolate fantasy. But then littlemissmuffet was something that was me.

The name made me smile always because it made me nostalgic..took me back to nursery where we were taught this nursery rhyme. And then 'little' changed to chotu. I thought Chotu was more real, more believable. And it gives out a lot more about me. I have no qualms about accepting the fact that i am a litle short. Also When you call someone chotu, you know the person has zero attitude and is so grounded.

I feel that how much ever I achieve or succeed in life, that would be nothing compared to the greatness of the great people that exist. I am nobody in this big world full of great people. I shall be chotu. This feeling is important for me because this shall help to keep me grounded always.

Moreover i think Chotu sounds cute ;) Did try and change my handle from Chotumissmuffet to Chocolatefantasy, and meethadil. Sometimes also think of changing it to something like 'Chatpatichutney' or 'paaani' but i realise that now i am chotumissmuffet for life. People love me as chotu and chotumissmuffet only!

Probably even I can relate to this handle the most. So then all the thoughts about changing the handle go into the dustbin :P Thank you to all the people here..for loving me as Chotu. Twitter and the people here are now such an important part of my day most of them being soooo sweeet. Love all of them. So here i am..Chotumissmuffet..Chotu..with big dreams..bada sa dil aur usmein dher saara pyaar. 

Once upon a time, I made a Twitter account and had my name as the handle which was practically a bad move given I have such a 'hot' name (Its a harsh world, I tell you). Had to change it pretty soon and came up with this stupid handle. It basically doesn't make much sense given I don't do much of this moroning thing called 'thinking'.  

Its simply because of these two reasons that I settled with this handle.

1) My lil sister suggested this handle. She was studying about Africa and racism and she told me based on those lines, you should set it as 'Hardism'. The first thing that came to my mind which may have come to your mind too (yeah, genius brains think alike ;) ) is that it's a frikkin pervert word. Well, sure is, so are my tweets at times. We are all perverts, aren't we? Just at different levels and comfortable with it at different levels.

2) The fish that helps me do the horoscopes, she agreed with it. No kidding, she actually winked.

That's a wrap with my handle story. Sorry to waste 2 mins of your life (not if you were going to watch cricket, that shit sucks balls)  Have a good day folks, keep smiling :)

OINK to meet you!

Disco Piggu….Yes! I love dancing…music gets my feet tapping and I feel any song can be disco-ed upon. Not much to elaborate on the ‘Disco’ bit of my handle but my affinity towards pigs certainly makes an interesting story. ;-)

 Four years ago, I started as an entrepreneur and had my first meeting with a client. It was pouring in Mumbai (nothing unusual about that) and the roads were flooded. I couldn’t cancel the meeting as it would be the first potential business opportunity.

 I was introduced to pigs from the time I started eating Pork. Surprised? Yes! Pork – eating Piggu? (Honestly, I gave it up once I started tweeting as @discopiggu). I fell in love with pigs when they….Umm..Let’s me make it a little dramatic.  

At 5 pm, meeting done… I stepped out to see knee – deep water all around. I had to walk to the main road to find any vehicle that could take me to the station. All of a sudden, I heard a grunting noise.  Yes!! I was being chased by three cute pigs!! (*Embarrassing smile*) That moment they definitely weren’t cute. I started running and the pigs started running behind me until I got into an auto. What a sight!

They were the cutest little pigs with their wiggly tails. That’s when I fell in love with them. Ok! Judge me! 

When I had to think of a twitter handle … what’s better than the two things I love the most – Disco and Pigs. So, that’s my handle story. 

Oh this is precious! Here you are expecting a nice lil tale about my handle…jokes on u buddy!

If I’m asked to describe how I came up with this handle, I wouldn’t be able to….not cos I was under LSD when it came to me..But cos I’m not its creator. Most of u are already familiar with the king of Bud (@kadweiser) amongst us (n if u aren’t shame on you)…yeap he came up with ‘mintaww’ n one of these days when I talk to him I will find out exactly why..For now I can only venture a guess…

But u will definitely see a connection once I’m done.. Patience my child *frowns*

You see Mint is my nickname…what friends refer to me as…ranges from Minty-Mints-Minta…and everything in between..But Kaddy’s mintaww is a first. (Yes Kaddy u get copyright for this one) Kaddy or as I call him,LP is my bestest buddy ever in the whole friggin planet, N no one …no one knows me better than him…I had been going thru a difficult patch with friends and family,  n being the social extrovert that I am found life to be very exhausting.. Sometimes all u need is someone to talk to.. n LP bein miles away didn’t help at all.. He kept pushing me to sign up for twitter.. But I was content with having FB where everyone thought I was the loony thing that kept updating statuses every two mins(or maybe I ws just being plain lazy, call it wtevr ).  Then finally he put his foot down n created this account for me..Only to complain later about the number of notifications he was receiving in his mailbox! (Serves him right)

Now there isn’t a day I don’t tweet.. For there are sooo many wonderful people I have met here (The 97 tweeps I follow) who otherwise I wud never have the fortune of knowing. Though I was dubious abt it in the beginning.. I’m happy LP did get me into this whole tweeting scene.. It has healed me in numerous ways.. That’ll do Mint, it’s supposed to be about the Handle not your life blog… So there you go… That is the story of ‘mintaww’..  For further information kindly feel free to follow* @mintaww  =D

*Follow at ur own risk, PLEASE BE AWARE THAT MY TWEETS MAY BE INACCURATE, MISLEADING, DANGEROUS, ADDICTIVE, UNETHICAL OR ILLEGAL!

I've been the tooth fairy's least loved child. Ever since I could remember my teeth have been riddled with problems most of which were thanks to nature messing up. Dead teeth, crooked ones, some that required surgery because they refused to surface. Eventually, I've spent so much time with my dentist that he's now one of my best friends and I've ended up learning quite a bit about the profession.

Also, my surname is Kanal. pronounced - Kuh-Nul, and not 'canal,' the mistake everyone makes when they read my name out aloud leading me to tear my hair out in frustration. Like most of my family members, I was called everything from Suez Canal to Indira Gandhi Canal when I was growing up. 

But the one 'canal' I associated myself most with was a 'Root Canal' (3 and counting!) Hence, when it came to choosing a handle that was partly my name, my identity and partly creative (because, c'mon, who here wants a boring handle?) I instantly saw the ingenuity of RootKanal. It's become sort of an alias now and this one's going to stick around with me for a long, long time.

Well, to say that I am a ‘Lord of the Rings’ fan would be an understatement. The history of my handle started off many years ago when we were watching the movie version of ‘Return of the King’ at a friend’s house. But of course, subtitles were on since some of us were too slow to understand the dialogues being spouted by Gandalf & his friends.

Bang during the siege of Gondor, insanity peeked at us from behind the screen. The ‘Grond’, a massive battering ram, shaped like a wolf, fire spewing from its mouth, was brought into action. The orcs started shouting, “Grond”, “Grond”, “Grond”, and one of us decided to start supporting them, by reading out the subtitles loud enough for the building a fair distance away to hear. We were able to shut him up by locking him in the next room till the battle was over, but the seed was planted.

The next day, another of us messaged us all saying that he’d received a promotion. My reply was ‘Congrats! When’s the party?’, as were all other replies except for, you guessed it, this particular sample. His reply? ‘Grond’. We gave up all hopes of him coming back to sanity an evening later, when he emailed us a heavily parodied version of Keats’ ‘Daffodils’, converted to a droll ‘Grondofills’, and named himself ‘The Grond King’. The whole mad phase, ‘Grondomania’ as I call it, lasted a few weeks. I called myself ‘Grondmaster’, another guy become ‘HyperGrond Beserker’, and what not.

A few weeks after this passed on, I was registering on some online forums, where using random usernames is the norm. The name that came to my mind first had already been taken. So I remembered my nickname from the Grondomania phase, aka Grondmaster, and tried registering with it. Got the registration, and the nickname stuck. My participation in the forum became very involved, and there I was, better known as Grondmaster than the guys who invented the whole madness. Then, Orkut was the norm & Facebook unheard of – my name there was also the same so that users of the forum could connect with me on Orkut as well.

When I joined Twitter in 2009, it was obvious enough to use the same userID that I was already known for in the electronic world, and now linking on all my social media accounts. So although I’ve been on Twitter for over two years now, I became active only a few months ago, hence have less than 2% of the counts that many of my friends have.

You would agree with me if you have a 't' in your name and if you've ever lived in South India. There seems to be an unwritten rule, a pledge almost, that the alphabet 't' in every and absolutely any name shall be followed by an 'h'. Gurudut becomes Guruduth, Rohit turns into Rohith and Thomas...err, never mind that one. And of course, I was a victim of this utterly incomprehensible (what’s the word I’m looking for here? Norm? No…policy? Decree? Let’s just go with that for now) decree wherein my name was modified every time it was written. Every single time.

In college, in administrative offices, on debit cards, hell, even on my receipt in Barista! Yeah, sure, when you yell my name out for me to come get my order, Swathi dun sound much different from Swati, but what about the receipt? Isn’t that evidence of this absolutely annoying ritual of theirs? I have proof, for fuck’s sake! I tried the best thing I could, the most sensible thing to do: every time I had to state my name, I would spell it. Yep, I would say “S-W-A-T-I, Swati”. To my utter disgust, that didn’t have an ounce of difference. People hear only what they want to hear. And they wanted to hear the ‘h’. Oh, so they so did. And so came into being what was later coined ‘Swati’s phrase’. I would say my name followed by a very emphatic “without an ‘h’”. 

This had them baffled initially but it worked like a charm. At least it worked 67.89% of the time. Hey, it’s better than never. The phrase caught on so well that our Barista fellas started calling out for “Swati without an ‘h’”! And thus, I kicked the ‘h’ out of my name. Sorta. But getting a handle on twitter with your actual name is, well, pretty much impossible now. With or without the ‘h’. Alas, I had to resort to other means. 

I did have a previous handle of sorts when I was in high school. Should I then use it? Yeah, that could work. I mean, who else could’ve thought of ‘silverglee’, eh? Apparently one other person had. Damnit – now what? 

No Swati, no silverglee. Hell, no Swathi either! Improvise a bit, maybe?

s1lverglee? No…seems like two ‘i’s instead of one.

silver6lee? Could do, but not quite convinced.

silv3rgl33? Way too many 3’s in that one.

silv3rglee? Bingo! 

It was still silverglee, but a bit cooler. I think so. =)

And so began another round of introductory sessions – this time at Tweetups.

Them: So, what’s your handle?

Me: silverglee (that’s how it sounds!)

Them: *pulls out smartphone* Lemme follow you now!

Me: Sure! I'll follow you right back! So, that’s silverglee with a ‘3’.

 There it was: Swati’s new phrase.

Got kinda complicated after that cuz this is how the conversations typically proceeded:

Them: *confused look* Umm…3?

Me: Yeah, so in silverglee, the first ‘e’ is replaced by ‘3’. Just the first one though.

Them: Errrrm…ok. *struggles to type*

Me: Oh goddamnit, just gimme your damn phone – I’ll find it for you. *rolling eyes*

 I don’t typically end up losing followers in this manner, in case you’re wondering. Actually, to be honest, I wouldn’t quite know – I don’t really keep count.  *bwaaaaaaaaahahahahahaahahahahahahahahahaahaha*

*lolSOB*

Anyway, yeah… *wiping tears*

That’s the story of my name. And my handle.