Blending, Branding & Bollywood!

We come across branded celebrity nuptials more often these days. The branding starts with a hashtaged  name blending of the couple. The first time I came across this trend was when Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie decided to live happily ever after and the world called them Brangelina!!! Though now the brand is hyphenated. Then came our Bollywood friends aping their Hollywood cousins and the first on the list was Virushka which was an amalgamation of the names of celebrities from two religions in India Bollywood and Cricket!

Initially I was impressed at their creativity only to realise later that there were online tools like couple name generator like an anagram generator that could churn out combined names of couples in various permutations and combinations.

Later on I learnt from my daughter that there was a term for this in the millennial lingo and was called ‘shipping’ or ‘ship’.  You could ship two romantically linked couple by co-joining their first or last names and flaunt it as brand. The convenience of publicizing their union was also simple. All they needed to do was to prefix a hashtag to their ‘shipped’ names to set sail on the sea of eternal bliss. Some though turned a Titanic half way through.  I’m sure the Sailing fraternity, which is an otherwise boring male dominated profession were more than happy to be romantically linked to the union of celebrity souls in love. The ‘shipped’ hashtags started trending on the social media sites and the numbers that followed them eclipsed the numbers that attended their wedding.

That is when the Malayalee in me woke up? This was an art we conceptualized generations back, We were the pioneers at combining names and our ancestors were the ones who started this trend of naming not themselves as a couple, but their offsprings with some lovely combination of their own names. Once they took this a tad seriously we had some interesting names doing the rounds, the best of which was Shitty, named after Shoshama & Ittycheria. Had the tools like the name generator been available then, we would have had an entire generation of Malayalees with esoteric names. Baby naming was so easy back then, a child born to an Aleyama and Varghese could be named Arghese…Close to Nargis!. Being born to Thomas and Gracy, had they followed the trend I could have been named Thoracy which sounded more like an acute throat infection.

Today almost every other Bollywood celebrity couple release their hashtaged ‘shipped’ names months before their big fat Indian weddings, that does not happen in India any longer. But picking the right one can be tricky, Virushka had Virat taking on a partial Anushka as the second half of the name and sent a message to the sorority that the husbands can take their wife’s names as surnames, then came Deepveer, now we can also argue that Ranveer let Deepika take the lead…the latest couple on the block is Nickiyanka which was a Transcontinental shipping liner altogether. The American with a small name managed to fit in his entire name into the equation though it sounds like the name of a Russian Gymnast.

Soon to be released is Hashtag AliaRan! Could well be the ‘shipped’ term for Aliya & Ranbir. Not sure if it sounds right though!

Wishing all the ‘ships’ and those ‘shipped’ a wonderful voyage irrespective of the tides and the icebergs they may encounter and make sure the hyphen does not split their brand.