Somehow, I don’t much care for christening a book or an article. I have always been sure of readers’ response. I had repeatedly seen readers buying a tabloid, turning pages to reach my column, read it immediately and then to return to the other articles. But I realized that my indifference to naming an article was partly because I’d spent long time in working out the name of the columns.
Some of the more popular names of my columns were Far-Out, An Ear to the Ground, OH Bombay!, Mohan Deep’s Diary, Mirch Masala, a Little Bird Tells me, Whispers…
But I didn’t give any heading to the stories, leaving it to the sub-editors. Some of them were quite creative and would give a catchy heading.
Naming a book, of course, is a different ball game.
I called my biography of Madhubala as ‘Madhubala’ and thought it was enough. This was the first time in India that anyone was writing a star biography of that calibre – well-researched, well-investigated, unafraid and unbiased. Magna group, which till then was into magazines, was to enter the world of books with my ‘Madhubala’. Unfortunately, the group faced a boycott from the film industry at that juncture. ‘Madhubala’ was about the scandals of older generation and some felt that it was not the right time to antagonize the older generation too. So the publishing schedule was changed. To return to the name of the book, some over-enthusiastic editor played with the letter M and called it ‘The Mystery and Mystique of Madhubala’.
Of course, Madhubala it remained.
It was easy to name the biography of Meena Kumari. Her life was so full of scandals that I didn’t have to think too hard to name it ‘Simply Scandalous: Meena Kumari’.
When I wrote the biography of Rekha, I first called it ‘Re’. This was the way she was addressed by her friends, admirers and lovers. But my friend journalist Chaitanya Padukane suggested ‘Eurekha!’ since I had unearthed every embarrassing scandal from her life. ‘Like Archimedes who screamed Eureka! when he discovered his principle (“a body immersed in a liquid or a gas has a buoyant force equal to the weight of the liquid or gas that it displaces.”) I was supposed to have ‘discovered’ the real Rekha. So ‘Eurekha!’ it was.
I’m writing about the names as I wanted a good name for my new novel.
I was not very enthusiastic about calling it ‘The Outsiders’. I could have just named it ‘Project 1’ but in stead settled for ‘The Outsiders’.
Now, I have got an exciting name for my new novel.
The name of my new novel is – The Five Foolish Virgins.
They have nothing to do with the five foolish virgins of Jesus Christ.
They also have nothing to do with the Foolish Virgins of the second world war.
They are Mohan Deep’s new novel –
The Five Foolish Virgins.
And the name has me excited.
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