Hey
Ravi ,
I'm afraid I don't know of a source that goes into the origin of nicknames in any depth, but you might be interested in the following listing of English-language nicknames, the most comprehensive I've found (
Mike C. was gonna link to this back when but I don't know if he ever did):
www.usgenweb.com/researchers/nicknames.html
Hope that's of some interest.
- Da.