naughty munnis and not munnis

naughty munnis and not munnis

Just the other day I dedicated one whole post to the resident terrorist in our house. Two evenings ago she broke a nice torch and was in the process of swallowing the contents of the battery when we managed to catch her and make her spit out what was still in the mouth. But obviously she had swallowed some which she spent the next day throwing up.Trouble is that she thinks that if anything can go into her mouth, it should!

We have experience with about 4 dogs now and the only other dog who was equally out of control was also called Munni. In our family, we have the tradition of naming children after people in the family and society who have been a good example, in the hope that these kids will also live up to the name.
After all, there are many people who believe that a child's name is the most important decision affecting her/his personality and future prospects.For example there are these people who say:"A balanced baby name will create intelligent mental qualities such as being expressive, happy, generous, outgoing, giving, responsible, reliable, stable, intellectual, and peaceful - to name just a few." Imagine what I could have achieved if only my parents had the sense to call me Sonia Gandhi or Sunita Williams or Indira Nooyi? It is all their fault that I am a mere Usha sitting and writing useless blogs while I ought to be running countries or corporates or floating in space. hmf..

Applying the same (il)logic, we wondered if a change of name might help. But then there are problems: having got used to her name by now, it is possible that she may not respond to a new name like lolita ( remember the demure, sweet tempered, patient and obedient girl from "parineeta"?) And lalita is the name of my sister and I have no intention of facing her rage. So Siddharth declared that we should call her "Not Munni".This is not new to us as we already have a "not Unni" in our lives.

This is how it happened. Siddhartha was about 5 or 6 then.We knew that appu nair, our friend who lived a street away from us, had a cook whom he referred to in conversations as Unni. Many times we had seen a person emerging from appu nair's house on a bicycle and we had concluded he was Unni. He always smiled at us while passing by our house. on a onam day, appu insisted we join him for lunch. Imagine our shock when he called out for Unni and the guy who emerged from the Kitchen was someone totally different. Not the one we had assumed to be Unni. So who was he, the smiling cyclist? We asked appu and he was not sure so he said "not Unni." So six year old siddhu started calling him "notunni" and we began to enjoy it so much we did not bother to find out his name.For instance he would say "Notunni gave me a ride on the bicycle today", "notunni was riding with a big jackfruit" and it worked just fine and I knew exactly who this man was. This has become such an inside joke that if we know the name of one of the two brothers in a house we promptly name the other NOtX as in Sachin and Notsachin.

And that's how we have a notmunni in the house now but I am not too hopeful that it is going to work in this case. True to being a Munni, she will defy all rules and all I will have is a munni in notmunni's clothing.