Write your Name. Leave a Mark.

All of us want to leave a mark behind. The value of which will be felt long after we are gone. Lets take the example of Kannada super star Dr. Rajkumar. The thespian actor of the South Indian language is no more amongst us today but what he did during his prime got him the respect and the adulation which was clearly on display at the time of his funeral recently. To me that is the perfect example of leaving behind a mark. Of course each of us leave our own mark behind in whatever we are involved in. Most times they are either at work or at home or something else that we are associated with, like a charity or a club. But this though is more about the literal thing. Leaving a mark in the literal sense.

You will find people leaving off their marks by scribbling their names in just about any place possible. The ones that are preferred as of today include the desks in schools & colleges, the Toilet walls, the backsides of public bus seats, the walls of historic monuments or the rocks enroute to the monument, the other day I saw two names neatly carved out on the footpath in some nondescript corner of some nondescript road. Looks like someone had been watching or had been plain lucky to be there at the place at the right time, for as soon as the cement was neatly applied to join two stone slabs somebody hurriedly wrote down their names. If all these could be called permanent options then there are some temporary options as well, like the walls of a building under construction especially the wall that is likely to be tiled. Such walls need to have a rough finish & the rough finish is given by drawing some designs on the walls or like you must know by now, writing names on it. The others among the temporary options include writing on a dust-laden car or on the sands in the beach.

Some people go to the extremes. Along the ever-increasing Q line in Tirupati you will find business cards clinging on to the tube lights. Do those who put it up there expect somebody to view the card & get back to them for business? Could be possible.

The literal leaving behind a mark thing has become such a big menace that we now find posters saying, “Please do not scribble on the wall” or “Please do not deface the walls”.

Wont it be a good idea if somebody came up with some innovative way of promoting this whole concept of leaving a mark. Really, I think it makes good business sense. How about a Name gallery that’ll display names on granite, marble & the other stones? Umm…. on second thoughts may be not a great idea. People have some innate fascination for their own names. Sudha Murthy has described candidly in one her books how some people will donate only if their name will appear on the granite blocks under the heading donors, little do they realize that nobody really gives a second look at those. Because who a Soubhagya Ramamurthy is or Govindraju Gowda is doesn’t really matter because nobody cares.

But then if not anything else a name is the only thing that each of us have, which is our identity, which we can call our own and which stays even after our body & soul is gone. That way what lives on forever is the name. That said naturally we want our name to be popular & well known by all, but does that mean we should resort to such desperate levels of making our names eternal?

Looks like a lot of people don’t quite agree to what the great bard asked once.

“What’s there in a name”? Well, quite a lot it seems.