What’s in a name? Humour, for one

"The neighbour calls him Sidha; the family across the street calls him Raja, but I call him Raju because it sounds better," said my friend. We were discussing her help, Sidharaju, who also worked in her neighbours' houses. Out of love, convenience, or whims and fancies, names are abbreviated, abridged, or split, often creating new ones. It's an art form in and of itself, and long "two or three names in one," like mine, readily lend themselves to it—Sneha, Sneh, and Lata are variations on the original.

My son's colleague, a techie, amused us with this anecdote: His office arranged a cab, with the driver displaying his name on a placard, to pick him up from the airport after an official trip abroad. Loading his luggage in the cab, he waited in the seat for the driver to start. When he received no response from the driver, he inquired, "What happened?" "Waiting for the others, sir," replied the driver. The techie's name "was made up of several names, with a string of them attached to the first to honour his grandfather, family, birthplace, and so on, and thus the confusion!"

Thanks to the linguistic peculiarities that our country abounds in, every language has its own way of pronouncing words and names. This is how our Tamilian tenant turned my elder son Deepak into "The Bug," and Vivek, my younger son, became "Bibek" to his Bengali friend's father!

This problem is not limited to individual names but also to places. In Malayalam, for example, the word "puzha," a tongue-twister that means "river," appears in the names of many places in Kerala. This makes a stranger to the language pronounce it in several funny ways except the correct way, much to the amusement of local listeners.

Names that are meant to identify people could defeat their own purpose when the outcome of their distortions and mutilations makes them something totally different from the original, belying Shakespeare's observation that a rose would smell as sweet even if called by any other name. It was perhaps the longing for a daughter in an all-boys family, but Radhakrishnan, a six-footer, answered to the call of "Radha" by his mother, baffling the visitors who were expecting a girl to walk in.

The names of the pets are no different or less intriguing. There are many dogs named Baby, Babu, Munna, Munni, Chintu, and Kanna roaming the streets. They have to be identified with "X Aunty's Baby" or "Y Uncle's Kutta" to correctly identify the pet being spoken about.

Many names commemorate individuals and events, as evidenced by the new names "Corona" and "Covid" in many young families; they include more than just famous names and pleasant events!