What is in a name?

Recently one of my cousins had a baby boy. Against my wishes I was dragged into the process of choosing a name for the baby. I participated reluctantly at first suggesting some names like Rishabh and Amit, but they said these where North Indian names and they wanted a good Mallu name. I suggested Arun, the malluest of all names, but they rejected it saying that there were already 783496 Aruns in our family and they wanted a name that is not very common and fully Mallu. I suggested Marthanda Varma; they came at me with a sword. This went on for quite some time during which a lot of names got rejected and out of desperation, I offered to loan my name. This idea was not met with an enthusiastic response. Fed up with all this I got up and flipkarted them a book called ‘Indian Baby Names’, thus ending my association with the long and winding processes. I have now decided to gift all my relatives who are having babies with this book so that I will be spared from the torture of having to be a part of the painstaking process of choosing a name for the kid.

I have heard that some people decide on what to name their kids, when they are young. I have had a friend who spilt up with his girlfriend and the reason was that they had a fight about what the name of their kids will be. I quite liked the idea of picking out your kids names early, so I decided to give it a try. So future wife of mine, Ryan Giggs , Wayne Rooney, Mila Kunis and Zoey Deschanel it is going to be.

 I frankly think kids should be able to choose their own names so that they don’t have to live the embarrassing name their parents have given then. I think kids when they are about 10 or 12 should be allowed to select what their name should be. Although if this is the case almost 99% of Indian kids will end up with the name Sachin Tendulkar.

There is this story of a guy who had a kid and decided not to give the kid a name. So everybody started calling him “No Name” and eventually his name became set as “No Name”. I have a friend whose name is ‘Amit’ with no second name. So when a teacher or someone asks for his name he says Amit and when they ask for the full name he says “Just Amit”. Now everyone calls him ‘Just Amit’.

There is no escaping this world if you have a weird name. Your life will be wasted standing in endless queues where you have to correct your misspelled name in certificates, ID cards etc. I have always had this problem. I have an easy first name ‘Gokul’ and a tougher second name ‘Raghunadh’. I know my second name is spelled wrong and it should actually be ‘Raghunath’. So whenever I fill out any official forms or something I make it sure to spell out my name to whoever is taking down my details. But inevitably when my certificate or the document I want comes my second name will be spelled wrong. Hello people who write certificates, I know the spelling of my name, you don’t have to spell check it for me. My certificate collection has certificates in it where my second name varies from Raghunath, Reghunath, Nath, Ranghunandan etc. Even my engineering mark lists spelled my name wrong and I had to stand in many queues to change that. Last month I had attended a seminar and when they gave me the certificate out of habit I checked my second name and surprisingly it was spelled correctly. That is when I noticed that my first name was spelled ‘Gekul’. Seriously people, why would anyone name their kid after something that sounds like a lizard?

Mallus have the practice of getting my first name wrong. They spell it ‘Gogul’. No good people of Kerala, I am not the search engine and there is a K in my name. But so many people are actually misspelling my name Gogul that I am now planning to create an alter ego ‘Gogul, The Media Mogul’. Somehow I don’t think that idea will click.

Another problem I had with my name was when I worked in Maharashtra. Marathis could not comprehend the fact that I had no caste name attached to my name. I tried to explain to them that we Mallus are very secular and most of us don’t prefer to keep our caste names with our names. This just led to more questions and fed up with answering all those I started to invent random Mallu caste names as my second name. So if you ever go to Jalgaon in Maharashtra and somebody tells you about a Gokul Pillai or Varma or Nair or Menon it is probably me. One doubt a Marathi friend of mine had was if Mallus don’t have caste names with their name then how will we know when we first meet a girl and ask her name if you can hit on her or not. I didn’t have an answer to that.

So to people who ask what is in a name, I say everything. It represents what you are more than anything else. It is like one of these things like where you are born or which caste you are born into, that even though you have no control on it plays a huge role in where your life ends up.  

Signing off with that,

Your Humble Blogger,

Sachin Tendulkar.