Raghavendra, call me Rag ( dishcloth, whatever!)

Raghavendra, call me Rag ( dishcloth, whatever!)

Some of us friends were discussing the new trends in baby names. First it was Arvind, Aditya, preeti and Neha; then it was Sachin and Rahul and Priyanka and Aishwarya.All these seem passé now so we wondered what was the decade’s flavour. There seems to be a preference for unique names rather than the names of popular heroes. Achintya, Bhadraksh, Adiyaman, Poongkuzhali, Aghanasini, Ahladita, Anarghya are just a few of the new baby names I heard recently. All so beautiful and sweet sounding but some are such twisters even to the Indian tongue. Imagine what might happene to Achintya and Ahladita where Padma can become bathma and mohan become a Mowgun! Recently I asked someone what his daughter’s name was and he said Ahila which I thought was Ahalya but it turns out that the child’s name is Akhila! Now some of these Anarghyas and poongkuzhalis are kids of NRI parents. I shudder to think of their fate in American mouths. They cannot pronounce simple names like Usha and kamala without making them into oosha and Camilla so why even think of names like Samarapungavan or Gnanambika. Mince meat is the term that comes to mind immediately – If you are a Tamilian think of what Udit Narayan does to Tamil in his songs. Kapisch?

I had a classmate in college with a really beautiful name – Tamizharasi. It means Tamil Queen but invariably the north Indian girls converted it to Tamilarisi making it Tamil Rice ( arisi: rice; arasi: queen)
If that was the result of inability to pronounce or ignorance of the language, there have been wanton abuse of names in the name of love . People try to shorten official names into short, cute (?) ones for daily usage and in the process end up distorting them. In our family and among our acquaintances and friends we had some classic examples of beautiful names totally annihilated:
Karpagam – Cuppu ( cuppa?)
Shivapriya – sheepri ( baa baa)
Padmini – Puppy (woof woof)
Kowsalya – Cow see ( mooooooo)
Meena lochani – Low chee ( can it get lower than this?)
Baghirathi – Baki or Bagee ( balance of what?)
Radhakrishnan – Rakittu/ Rockettu ( high flier indeed!)
and the Srinivasans who became Cheeni (cho chweet) .

And then there were those names that made you an easy target for ridicule among friends when they wanted to settle scores. There was a boy in the neighbourhood with a lovely name : Lokabhiraman. But when his friends wanted to tease him he became Lokapi (low kaapi?) and sometimes kakapi ( meaning crow shit in Tamil). Then there was a boy with a majestic name like Kulothungan ( the name of a famous Chola king ) but people insisted on calling him Clothu as if he was a piece of fabric. And Poor Savithri in our class was always called Savi one or Savi two but never Savi three.

I am not a great fan of shortening names and mangling them . But I must admit that I was impressed when I heard about two sisters named Ramya and Ranjini whose father shortened them to Rum and Gin! I bet you have seen similar creativity applied while destroying names. Please share.