What’s in a name?
Clad in crisp cotton off white saree with a gold embroidered border, her hair above bedecked with jasmine and neck down with jewelry, the new mother sat pristinely amongst the crowd. Besides her were placed a serene array of brightly lit bronze lamps and incense sticks pierced into a plantain, it’s fragrance wafting through the premises. She took the crying baby adorned in gold up in her arms while the rest of the crowd cheered, and whispered gently into his ears, “Pancharakuttan”.
‘Panchara kuttan’ which stands for ‘A sweet baby’ in Malayalam, but somehow literally translates to ‘Sugar baby’ which has a whole different connotation today would be the little man’s name then on. It didn’t matter how tall he grew, how old he grew, how strong of a character he was or what he accomplished, he would remain a ‘Sugar baby’.
Reminds me of the movie ‘Namesake’, where the protagonist ‘Gogol Ganguli’ is named after a Russian Novelist ‘Nikolai Gogol’, his father’s inspiration. The boy as a teenager, struggles to explain to his friends and dates in college the origin of his supposed ‘uncool name’ as perceived by him.
There is a well known snake catcher in the state of Kerala who makes it to the news now and then and goes by the name ‘Vava Suresh’, translating to Baby Suresh, probably something his mother called him once. The man has beaten death many a times and tussled with the most venomous of reptiles, however as against his image of a daredevil, he still goes by the very docile name, ‘Vava’.
To this day, I am unsure about the exact meaning of my own name and research hasn’t helped much nor have my parents. All I know is that it stands for ‘auspiciousness’. It was recently during Covid that a patient asked me the meaning of my name and the one next to him, an elderly gentleman quipped, “Her name means ‘ Mahalaxmi-The Goddess of Wealth’ ”, though my bank balance would scream otherwise. Incidentally, that is also the round about meaning of my mother’s name.
Indian traditional names are profound with usually a Sanskrit origin. The newer ones though have managed to butcher the tradition with their so called ‘cool’ but meaningless ones. If you ask, ‘“What’s in a name?” Well, the answer is ‘everything’. It is your identity, the ease by which people can remember and refer to you(far easier than remembering mind numbing pronouns), it is a sign of respect, acknowledgement and most importantly determined how soon you would be called for your viva voce in school.
It was once after performing a CPR in hospital on a Covid patient when my colleague asked me, ” So, your name is ABC?’ Well, it wasn’t. I was being addressed by my sister’s name, close but a few consonants different. My mother was once wrongly informed about tanking her board exams because her professor had got her name mixed up with an other student. That also reminds me, we would be deservingly admonished by our Nephrology professor for referring to patients by their bed numbers and not their names. It didn’t matter if they were names of foreign citizens with strange pronunciations, you were required to remember them.
I once heard in a podcast where a well known singer addressed the chief guest to the function, a Major General in the army as General Manager and justified it as nothing of much consequence, but an innocent exchange of terms. Also, on stage referred to the bank they were promoting with a different name since both shared similar sounding four letters as abbreviations. As he put it, they both started with H and ended with C.
Since we are on the topic of hilarious yet embarrassing experiences; a much younger me once had to introduce on stage an army official and his topic for the day, something akin to ‘Biological warfare’ and I proudly announced it as ‘Biological welfare.’ The facepalm moment and roaring laughter was interrupted and rectified immediately by one of my professors as, ‘Warfare that leads to welfare’. Today after Covid, I am not sure how.
You will often hear the actor, Shah Rukh Khan a.k.a SRK say, “Whenever I feel that stardom is getting to my head, I take a trip to the United States and the immigration officials kick the star out of my stardom.” Supposedly his name is used as an alias by one of the underworld operatives. A very discomforting combination of danger with hilarity and embarrassment.
I recently found my namesake on a writing platform. I am glad she writes well and I enjoy reading her work. As far as putting out my actual name is concerned, I don’t consider it either dangerous or embarrassing. It is just that this pseudo name sounds way cooler and speaks more about my personality than my actual name does. So, until my bank balance catches up, ‘Mahalaxmi’ can stay in the back burner.
