WHAT'S IN A NAME III

A person's name is his very core, his very identity. It knid of defines who one is, in a way. Don't get me wrong, I am not oversating the case. For example being Manmohan Singh is not what made him a supine, spineless sardar given to inaction, misdirection and even, as in the case of his address in the electoral roll, downright liar; those are the key elements of his character. But when we say Manmohan Singh we immediately recall a picture of this pusillanimous person in a flowing white dress and wispy white beard concealing a dark heart.  No, this is not a tirade on Manmohan the seat-warmer.  On the other hand this is a note on my observations of Chennai names. So, let's move on....

The West, as in all things modern, set the agenda in the name game. They have a First name, Last name and Middle names. Whereas the First and the Last are one each, with some exceptions which I shall come to in a moment, the middle can be any number. If you are of high birth the chances are that you have many middle names in order to please all those ancestors living and dead who contributed to your high birth. Sometimes last names come in double-barreled variety  with  a hyphen in between, especially if you are English person of noble (what is noble about reprobate bankrupts is the matter for another blog) ancestry. In Iceland they have a first name followed by one which says whose son or Daughter you are. Sigmund's son is unsurprisingly called Sigmundsson – the missing apostrophe identifies them as not native English speakers.   In the case of daughters, it works the same way but with bad spelling – Sigmund's daughter would be called Sigmundsdottir. Of course Bjork the singer is an exception to the rule – just as she can't sing and is still classified as a singer, she has no “dottir”attached to her name, but is still an Icelander. The Czechs and Russians follow similar rules. Pavlov's son is a Pavlov but the daughter is a Pavlova, and, interestingly enough, so is the wife. Something to do with the fact the wives and daughters carry eggs (ova, anyone?) and the sons and fathers dont. They knew a thing or two, the Russians. Czech system is similar. Hannah Mandlikova is the daughter of Mr Mandlik (there is a large body of opinion in Mumbai that he was originlly a Maharashtrian; but then Mumbaikars claim anyone worth knowing as one of their own). I have no idea how the lesser members of European Community name their sons and daughters.

Closer to home, the Maharashtrians have a very systematic way of naming their children: Your own first name, followed by father's first name followed by the surname. Gajanan Wamanrao Akolkar for example would be the son of Wamanrao Grandpa Akolkar. The daughters confusingly exchange their father's name for that of their husband's first name. To add to the confusion, they also change their first name. Poonam Kantak all of a sudden bomes Priya Desai one day after her wedding leaving you wondering when did you employ this new person and who exactly is the new person until someone explains the metamorphosis. Perhaps its symbolic of the larva metmorphosing into a beautiful butterfly but in actual fact the metamorphosis works the other way:  beautful young ladies become pupae (all swaddled and covered up) and then larvae. Syrian Christians of Kerala sometimes use a curious system: my friend Thomas Philip is the son of Philip Thomas who was the son of Thomas Philip, and it goes like this ad infinitum. In addition to being confusing this did not provide for a second son who, if he existed, ran the risk of being niether Philip nor Thomas which is all very well in the normal course but not when Philip and Thomas mattered so much to a family. Besides, this system does not provide for Susamma, the daughter of Sramma to name her own daughter Saramma who in turn would name hers Susamma. As I said it is a mere diversion.

Chennai, as in many other things leads the way in cutting through the clutter, shining a light through the fog, as it were. We do not depend on our fathers to prop up our names in the middle lest it sag. We put our fathers where they belonged: right up front. We dont need sly hints as eggs-carriers to identify our women – they are clearly women unlike the anorexic Czechs with 6 foot long legs and built on Euclidean staright lines. When you see one of ours, you exclaim “there goes a Chennai woman”. We have simple names like M. Shanmughavalli, R.Thirugnansambandam K.Thiruvenkatanarayanaswamy, P.Akilandeswari, and the like. Or even B. Sundar, M.Aruna,  R.Mona, K.Meena etc.

 Its your name standing alone in all its glory and alongside no one else's. We dont depend on our ancestors for legitimacy; we are who we are and that's that. We do make concessions to marriage lest the husbands feel inadequate: we take their initials instead of our fathers. The said P.Akilandeswari would become R.Akilandeswari should she marry S. Ramalingappamoorthy. Akilandeswari remains who she was; she does not become Subin or Audrey all of a sudden.

We also keep the names short these days, a a means of saving ink and paper (we are green and always think of all ways to save trees) as a sampling will show: Mona, Mini, Leepika, Jenaan, Jebin, Asin,  etc. And Vimmi. The last one I suspect is a tribute to eponymous yester-years Hindi actress. Her career, as I remember was as brief as her name. These days we don't name our girls thus and instead scrub our frying pans with Vim.

My absence from Chennai in certain crucial phase of my life (and theirs as well) deprived my children of the magnificently logical and simple Chennai way of naming. They are not M. Something and M.Somethingelse. I let my son study abroad after school and his name got shortened to mean “a residue after fire” (3). To  add oil to the fire, my daughter hasn't even taken her husband's last name (being from another part of the country, he does have a last name) after marriage. She continues to be A(+7letters) M(+1letters).

My mother maintained that introducing her to The Feminine Mystique, Female Eunuch, The Second Sex, Dialectic of Sex, etc and Kate Millet, Betty Friedan, Simone de Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer, Shulamit Firestone et al in her teens was a big mistake.  She would have preferred that A(+7) was named Soundarya and learnt Vishnu Sahasranamam instead of Feminist polemics.