Mr.Sachs and Mr.Murugappa

Sukumar Ranganathan — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 05:17:00 GMT

Under Rants

A colleage forwarded me a message from PR firm Vaishnavi regarding a meeting with (I quote): "Mr M M Murugappa, Chairman of the Rs 9582 crore Murugappa Group".
One would expect the communications agency representing a company or a group to get names and designations right.
The man's name is M M Murugappan and I used to know him fairly well when I was a reporter in Chennai many years ago.
And he isn't, at least according to the Murugappa Group's website, the chairman of the group.
That's M A Alagappan.
So, the agency got both the name of the person and his designation wrong.
It must be difficult for some people to get used to names such as Murugappan and Alagappan (Vellayan and Subbiah are other common names you are likely to encounter in the Murugappa Group). Mint journalists aren't immune from this. Since January, they have got 37 names and 20 designations wrong (for the record, all of these have been corrected in keeping with our policy on corrections and clarifications which is part of the Mint code).
No one likes to see their names spelt wrong -- not in an article and, I'd guess, not in a press invitation.
Before I started covering the Murugappa group in the 1990s, a senior reporter at the paper I used to then work for said I'd discover that the finance department of all group companies was staffed with countless Murugappans and Alagappans (the Chettiar community to which the promoters of the Murugappa Group belong is partial to these names; Chettiars are also supposed to have a way with numbers).
I didn't come across too many Murugappans and Alagappans other than those that belonged to the promoting family, though.
Still, my sympathies lie with the PR executive. If it's the Murugappa group, it stands to reason that the person's name is Murugappa.
And they lie with the copy editor who, many years ago, in a front page story in a (pink) financial daily used Mr Sachs in the second reference to Goldman Sachs.

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Mr.Sachs and Mr.Murugappa