The Name Game

Certain names date people. Chances of a Percival or a Prudence having a Facebook profile will be slim, chances of them being alive even less.

Apart from being old-fashioned or obsolete, some names are totally outrageous... as is the case of Apple and Moses. That honor goes to the progeny of Gwyneth Paltrow. Moses? Seriously? What was she smoking? Bulrushes? Sage Moonblood is Sylvester Stallone’s way of torturing a daughter. And all this time, I thought those punches to his brain while shooting the movie Rocky (and its five sequels), he had used a double.

Out of curiosity, I googled celebrity baby names and these are a few I found:
Atticus and Aurelius - were they conceived after watching 'Gladiator'? Brooklyn Joseph and Bronx Mowgli - what happens if they move to Queens? Diva Muffin and Daisy Boo - a singing cake and a scary flower come to mind.

The stitch in my side prevented me from going further down the alphabet.

It’s one thing to have a cheesy name. Another to bear the burden of a blunder made by ignorant Indian-American parents. It would bode well for some of them to check out meanings in Merriam-Websters before naming their kids - or even doing a Charades version of “sounds like….”. Names like Harshit and Hardik, Anal and Penal and....drum roll please... Fahkruddin: incontestable reasons for granting these kids clemency, when they are charged with the heinous, yet justifiable act of shooting their parents.

Some kids hate their name for no apparent reason. When my daughter Meera was small, she didn't like her name and wanted to change it to Melisa. I patiently explained why not, and said I had never seen a black-haired, brown-eyed, dark-skinned Melisa before, and we wouldn’t want to set a precedent in case it takes off.

She came back with, “How about Ashley, instead?”

It must be a gene thing, as I hated my name as well and wanted to change it to Sunita – for reasons best forgotten. I changed my mind when I found out it was another name for Saraswati – the Goddess of Knowledge. Oh! The pressure of living up to the name. If only I had a brain...or at least a brain with some gigabytes of memory left.

It seemed there was another reason I was called Bharti.

I was talking on the phone to a woman at a call center, and when for some reason (which had to be really important, as I would reveal certain classified information only to the DMV and/or to someone holding a gun to my head), the topic turned to my age. She said, very astutely, that I must be in my fifties. Now it may be an old-fashioned name, but pinning it down to the decade takes some doing.

How on earth??? To date no one had explained to me why so many of my contemporaries also suffered the same misfortune of having a name which involved some sialoquence during introductions, and a lot of time, effort, patience and repetition.

A little side note here. The ‘bh’ sound does not exist in the English language and in a few others as well. Maybe in some Bantu language somewhere, but researching this does not appeal to me. I am tortured enough with having the ‘bh’ coupled with an ‘r’ and then having to live in a country where they cannot pronounce, nor remember my name.

The name-mutilation has ceased making me wince, only because I have changed my name to 'Bati'. Took out the offending ‘bh’ and the cursed ‘r’ and what remained was a pronounceable, yet unique name - or maybe not, as I did find a shop with this pseudonym in Florence. To my embarrassment, I found out that it also is the Caribbean term for 'ass' or 'bum'.

Less embarrassing is that some knuckleheads pronounce it is as Batty - followed by a juvenile giggle. Note to the Harshits out there: I would not laugh, if I were you. Crazy, as opposed to animal excrement. Take your pick.

To get back to the Name thing. It was a pretty interesting story, however.

India got its Independence in 1947. The next few years saw a lot of rejoicing in the new country, and apparently a lot of the rejoicing went on in the bedroom. The next generation had a slew of patriotic names, Bharat and Bharti being foremost amongst them. Bharat, apart being a celebrated hero and monarch of India, was also the Sanskrit name of the country (albeit with a different pronunciation). When the girl was born, they probably said let's just stick an ‘i’ at the end, and be done with it.

It’s a girl after all, who cares.