#thehandlestory

“Your birth name can keep you anonymous forever... but your act will give you names which will last with the frame of its intensity.” Via - @honeyviscous

  So, what is the story behind my twitter handle? Is there really a story behind my twitter handle or the people I follow? I never thought someone would ever ask me this question. But when @TheHandleStory asked me to write one, I gave it a thought, and then I realized, there is one.

  The reason I joined Twitter was that, within a month of migrating to Facebook from Orkut, which I did very late though, I got tired of dealing with friend’s requests from those people, I do not want to have any contact with, those one’s .. friend of friend, mutual friends, .. .. and the second thing was Farmville.

  Initially, when I joined twitter, I tried many handles, but it turns out the some of the witty ones I can think of were already in use, and I do not wanted to go on with my boring full-name handle. So I kept on looking for the witty word or words which are in common use (but yet a new one on twitter at least), which can describe a bit of me and can be used as twitter handle.

  The idea of putting some e-mail –ish kind of handle like pk2011 or pkumar11 did occur to me, but thanks to my stars, I didn’t use them. I couldn’t get the feel out of them.  When I couldn’t think of any witty and unique handle name, I ended up with mystical2011. Yeah! That is the wittiest I could think of at that time. Poor me. I wasn’t happy with that, still I went ahead with it and eventually the account saw the light of the day although there was minimum activity… for a few months initially.

  Then one fine day, while killing time, we, me and some of my friends (real ones and not from FB or twitter) were discussing nick names, matching / mashing them up and suddenly the idea struck my little mind. Why not my nick name as twitter handle?

  So I added up the two nick names I had, “Fluffy” and “Bluffy”, given by two lovely ladies, my best friends - @HappyZindagi and @IChitraSingh, and changed my twitter handle to @fluffynbluffy , that’s it. That’s is how I got this twitter handle. Since then non - stop blabbering on twitter is going on.

The story behind my twitter handle? I never thought I would be asked this question in this lifetime, for sure. But now that I am, let me make the most of it.

Obviously, as most of you must have right assumed, this was surely not my first choice twitter handle. I went for the obvious names to start with which had my name, my name and last name together, my name and date of birth together and then moved on to names relevant to my favorite teams – Manchester United and West Indies Cricket Team, but none of them were available. Most of them were taken by people who randomly created the handles and had not tweeted for months and years together. 

This is when I was told by @ankeetd and @umennet, that twitter will become the next big thing after Facebook and it will soon become an identity for me. I did not take it seriously then, but they insisted I should use something which was unique and could depict me. Well, this is when we started breaking my head to come up with something that could reveal who I really am and the closest that I came to being myself was on the field of play. As jovial and happy-go-lucky that I am off the pitch, I become equally cold and furious when I am on it – this is where I got the world ‘COLD’ and in my teens when cricket was the only way I could make a name for myself (not being good at academics) and I chose to be really nasty when it came to that. When the physique and the fitness levels supported me those days, I could bowl deceptively quick and could bowl a few nasty bouncers at the batsmans head and I was really proud of that. I tried to model myself on the great Carribean fast bowlers who could bounce batsman out at will and maybe, managed to be 10% of what they were. Being one of the few who managed to bouncers then in my team, I could really hurt and this is where the word – KILLER came from and then I tweaked it ‘NEMESIS’. 

This was on the field, off the field, like a typical Libran, I could be sarcastic, nasty and get away with making a point without many noticing that they were humiliated. An ability that I have inculcated in me courtesy the profession that I am in. I take great great pride that my one liners can kill (pun intended) (“,). 

Back in 2010, when I was doing my internship in Andheri, I saw a lot of Cable TV ads in the office that featured fallacious ‘Babas’ who promised to remove all kinds of hindrances from our lives that even included natural disasters.

Half of these con artists were working from their 1 BHK hermitages based in Jogeshwari. I was a huge fan of these ads. So when I decided to join Twitter, as homage I wanted a ‘Baba’ title. A Baba name to end all other Baba names. I chose @BabaJogeshwari as an all-embracing alias. As for my other name ‘Gina Kholkar’ that’s Mithun Chakraborty’s undercover sobriquet from the movie ‘Roti Ki Keemat’.

It's quite simple really. I am in a profession that's dominated by Bongs. They surround me in office with their accents and their Tagore and fish curry and sheer brilliance. They also make for brilliant caricatures with all their eccentricities. My real name is Manas. It is, I've been told, a Bong name.

Apparently, I also look a little "Bongish". I never tweeted regularly from my own account @manasgupta. I figured that twitter could be fun if I start a Bong parody account. I was wrong. Well, twitter was fun... is fun, but the parody wasn't. I soon switched from a Bong-oriented focus to general jokes, puns and wordplay. The handle stayed. And I am stuck with it. As for the Buffoon part...I like humour. Sure, some of my jokes suck, but then, some don't.

No, I am not 'free', neither does my handle mean, 'forever available.' Read on to know Why: 

I was at my desk, nearly three months ago, at an architectural firm, trying to make sense of the job at hand. Well, as most people hate their jobs, I liked mine. My field is pretty creative when it comes to assignments. All hail Architecture. But this day was pretty boring. The girl in me demanded excitement, a break from the mundane, an outlet for the crazy in me. So I decided to test Twitter, for the second time. Second time, because when I made an account previously, I was too bored of this place for I believed in interacting with the people I knew. The previous account was thence, deleted. Dusted. Buried. And never reborn. 

So, I gave another try. I had a hard time trying to figure out a handle that defined me. A handle that could be known. A handle that wouldn't get lost in the crowd. So, barring all the coffee handles that most of us have, and the 'Iamblabla's', I gave myself a moment of silence. That day was my last day at work, and I was going to be jobless for all the months to come ahead until my exams in October. Thus, @Fukatladki was born.

My handle means 'a jobless girl'. People obviously cannot blame me for tweeting profusely, because then again, I am fukat. I have been trying to live-up to my handle, and there have been no regrets so far. Conversations with strangers start with, 'Hello, I am fukatladki. And you are?' It's become a trademark of sorts, not that I am boasting,but it's been appreciated. Of course, even when I acquire myself a job, I'd still be a 'fukatladki,' Because you know, joblessness doesn't necessarily come with landing yourself a job. It's a crafted part of your life where you'll always prefer being a little 'fukat' at times. So here I am, on Twitter, a fukat. A girl who appreciates joblessness. A girl who believes in being lazy, a slug. 

This what you see is a reincarnated handle, if I can say so, though it doesn’t mean that I believe in reincarnation, as it’s said in Twitter jargon, “RTs are Not Endorsements”. Wink! So, the earlier one was @TextuallyHorny and as you might be wondering now, it echoes my innuendo-philic tweets. Some said it’s “interesting”, some found it “horrible” and thus it went on… Lately, when it became a little awkward to continue a conversation with this handle I decided to change it to @Greyllusionist.

It’s not just the fondness for the color but I believe shades of grey are prevalent among all of us. Black & white is a rarity, it’s all grey souls around. Grey emotions, grey desires, grey liaisons and grey perceptions. These grayish thoughts never fail to amaze me and I love to observe real life and real people’s stories, the fictitious reality or the real fiction is more intriguing more the grays in it. And on Twitter it finally boils down to how much grey matter one has as wit is the winner here. It being a complete virtual world everything is a mere illusion where a single click of the mouse it takes to vanish in entirety. It can’t be better resonated any other way.

I signed up on twitter wayyy long ago, in 2008, because it was the new cool thing to do. I used a more personal handle that contained my first name, as is with most people. And then, as is with most other people, they start finding leads to get to know more information about you and that can get a little creepy. Following that and a few things that stressed me out, I deleted my twitter account altogether - this, sometime around February 2011. May 2011, I moved back with the family and really needed to keep my mind off things that mattered and concentrate on feeling better about myself. Needless to say, there was twitter - the age old buddy who never judged when I walked away and the age old followers who promptly followed when I got back on Twitter as @CookyDoh.

Why @CookyDoh? I was heavily into baking through 2010 and 2011 and I'd never really eat anything I baked because I'd stuff myself on cookie dough while cutting out cookies to bake. That, put together with my eccentric side, my love for Homer and an attempt at being funny and/or creative lead to this handle. Not to forget the anonymity angle, of course. I've also come up with other food-based handles: @OmNomohShivay, @duodenomnom, because associating myself with all things food just makes me very very happy. Whether or not I'll ever use them is a different story altogether.

So it was the third year of my biotechnology engineering course, and as usual I was punished and hence was sitting on the front bench, listening to how interestingly Genetic material DNA multiplies. As a biology student, I was always interested in this "how genes work". Yes, we are a boring lot, but hey, we make the medicines. And food. And also make sex interesting. So there I was, one day wanting to be a cancer research scientist, when a new professor walked in to start this subject called " Industrial Microbiology". From the name itself I had decided that I will be clearing this subject at 40 marks, i.e. minimum marks required for passing, when suddenly he said those golden words, "Today, we learn how Beer is made."

I was shocked. Stunned. "Did I just hear BEER?" in a classroom. Are they REALLY going to teach us that. Quickly I thanked my parents for spending money on my education That was the day I found my true love, Beer. I not only loved the concept of beer, I fell in love with the entire procedure of making beer. The whole brewing procedure got me passionate about my beer and that was when I realized, my other 59 classmates can get into research for cancer, I wanted to become a brewer. 

Frankenstein needed a brain to function. That guy was a chilled out bloke who couldnt quite function without a brain. As a kid I admired Frankenstein cause maybe it was what he needed. He did not want people to fear him, he wanted to share love. All he needed was a brain. That brain however in me was Beer brewing. It was something I needed to drive me on. Beer had become my love and not only the drinking part, though to be honest drinking was a major part. I wanted to make people knowledgeable about beer and share the love of beer with the world. Brewing had made me into a Frankenstein. Beer had made me @Brewkenstein.