By any other name in India - Humour

By Any Other Name in India

By

Sharad Bailur

Let us begin with my own names. I was given four names: Sharad, Deepak, Bertrand and Hikmatpasha. It was only later that I came to know why I was given these names. Since I have an older brother who is named Hemant ( Hoar/Frost – late winter) I was named Sharad (early winter), though I came in on the stage, so to speak, later.

“But then my brother was named what he was because he was born on the 27^th of January. I was born no where near a winter. “ I protested.

“Your brother was named after a season. So were you”, said my mother. The logic, if a little obscure to the uninitiated, was, to my mother, bang on the nail. Can you imagine anyone in the US being called Fall or Summer? Now imagine calling not one but two children, both boys, Late Winter and Early Winter! A perceptive friend suggested that I had been conceived in early winter, which could well be true but I dare not ask my mother. Nevertheless I call it a lack of imagination compounded by an error in time. And to this day she refuses to listen to me. So I am still stuck with my first name.

As for the other names, Deepak (Lamp) came because a neighbour’s child had been named Deepak, (another instance of that famous lack of imagination), Bertrand came from my father a great fan of Bertrand Russell and Hikmatpasha came from my grandfather, an even greater fan of a race horse of that name that had won for him some money at the Mahalakshmi race course.

My surname is Bailur. In Kannada (the language spoken in the state of Karnataka in south India), Bail stands for an unploughed field while Ur means village. Bailur therefore literally means the village in the middle of the field. Bail in common north Indian parlance means Ox rather than Bull, but quite often the one is mistaken for the other. I have for long been accused of bullshitting. I thought all along that whatever I said did not meet with my listener’s approval. It was later, much later, when it turned out that people looked at me strangely and expected me to flick a tail and snort, that I realised that “bullshit”, had in some strange way got attached to my name.

I also find that crockery shop owners very often treat me like I was their worst enemy. They never allow me to enter their shops. I have therefore never been able to purchase a respectable crockery set to this date. I still use a metal tea pot rather than one made of china to pour my tea out of. And much though I love Chinese food I seem to find that for some mysterious reason I cannot fathom I hate their crockery though it has never done me any harm and people like Henry Tham, who owns Kamling restaurant, are, in fact, good friends. It has got so far that I keep feeling the sides of my head to see if I am growing horns.

But then there is nothing that I can do about it. This is rather unfair because I acquired my surname because of the chance fact that my grandfather had a widowed aunt who adopted him; hence the name Bailur. His brothers and their children to this day bear the name Nadkarni. And that means village headman. Nothing funny there till one realises that not a single Nadkarni has ever held such a responsible position for the last three hundred or more years. Calling yourself “village headman”, does not apparently make you one.

My father goes by the first name Maruti – a name I so hated as a child, because it is another name for the monkey God, that I once seriously asked him why he did not change it to something sensible like DeSouza, for instance. DeSouza is a nice, plump, rotund, Portuguese name and is revelled in by Catholics from Goa and Mangalore – not Hindu Saraswats from North Kanara but then I was too young to know that religion and caste had intervened long before I was born. I liked the name DeSouza because the neighbourhood baker called himself DeSouza and he made heavenly, drooly cakes. It would be great to have a cake baker in-house so to speak. But my father vetoed the idea and continued to call himself Maruti, much to my chagrin. So, no free cakes. Then Indira Gandhi’s son Sanjay started to make an Indian car which he called Maruti. It was only then that the name Maruti acquired a new respectability. My father then boasted that the new car had been named after him.

I got my education in varied places all over India – Rajkot in Gujarat, Pune in Maharashtra, Hyderabad in Andhra and Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh. I was too young to remember much of Rajkot or the names people bore there. But Maharashtra is a treasure trove of the most wonderful names.

The one I liked most was that of a minister in the Maharashtra government called Potdukhe. It means tummy ache. Then there is a friend of my cousin. His name is Dhekne. Dhekun means bedbug. Another guy revels in the name Doiphode which means head breaker. There must have been an axe executioner in the past there somewhere. Then there is a Bodke (baldy) who was a clerk under me, a Kavle (crow) who runs the neighbourhood video parlour, and a Dhamale (Fatsy) who looks like he has just returned from a TB sanatorium. In each of these names they pronounce the last e. Kavle is therefore pronounced Kaavlay; and so is the case with the others. Then there is this chap who talks nineteen to the dozen. Ironically his name is Gupchup (shut up) while in our office in Pune I have this taciturn gentleman who refuses to talk except to tell us from on high that whatever is the matter, it is a “Tatvachi gosht” (matter of principle). His name is Mahashabde (the garrulous one). But the one who flashed past me in his car yesterday was perhaps the most insulting. His name was Ekbote which means up yours. And I’d done him no harm.

Occasionally I feel sorry for those who are genuinely unhappily placed when it comes to names. Some years ago, one Sunday winter morning, and as you know winter’s in Mumbai are merely cool summers, I was riding around in Goregaon (the village of the white people) on my motorbike and was trying to remember the name of my son’s paediatrician because he had developed a case of the sniffles, when I chanced upon a paediatrician’s sign-board on the road. To begin with I was quite happy till I looked at the board more carefully. The name of the doctor was Dr. T.B. Cholera. At first I doubled over with laughter, and then on second thoughts decided against taking my son to him. For all I know Dr. Cholera is the best paediatrician in the suburbs of Mumbai. He labours under an unfortunate name. Then there is this friend of a relation. He said his name was Prakash but he refused to tell me his family name. It was only later that I came to know that it was Hagwane (a case of loose motions).

During my travels all over India I have noticed that it is possible to place a person’s state of origin by his name with a fair degree of accuracy. If he has a dozen initials to begin with followed by something terse like Rao you can bet your shirt, boots and everything else that he is from Andhra. Hence VKRV Rao. I once had a school mate in Hyderabad who rejoiced in the name of PSVCHSVD Prasad. Till very recently the Managing Director of Maruti-Suzuki the car maker was RSSLN Bhaskarudu. No, don’t laugh. This is serious. A Patnaik must belong to Orissa while a Chatterjee or Mukhopadhyay has to originate in Bengal. Similarly a Srivastava is from UP while a Patel belongs to Gujarat, probably the district of Anand from where all that milk comes. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel did.

Those who do not belong to Maharashtra make much of Marathi names. My colleague from the State Bank BVVR Rao (Yep. He is from Andhra) insisted that Phadke meant to tear (like in “tear cloth”) , while Naphade meant not to tear. I had to explain to him that it was a result of mispronounciation. Phadke is pronounced Phudkay while Naphade is pronounced Naphday. In any case you Andhras have funnier names. How about Ghanti Mohana (speaker of the Lower House of Parliament). It means Lord Krishna with a large penis. That shut him up.

Among us Saraswats too we get names that can acquire unexpected connotations. Udyavarkar is a case in point. It means “Raise it tomorrow”, in Marathi, which, mercifully, is not the language Saraswats speak. The added implication of, “You can’t manage it now”, would have been too much. It turns out that Udyavar is merely the prosaic name of a place in South Kanara.

But there are exceptions. Take Sharma. He can come from virtually anywhere in the country. It merely means a Hindu priest. But if he comes from Andhra it is decreed that he shall have a number of initials before the name and that he will spell it without the H: Sarma.

Tamil names are in a class by themselves. Apart from being elaborately long they are virtually unpronounceable, unless of course you are a Tamilian. How about Gobichettipalayam Venkatapathy Balasubramanium? So far as I am aware there are six types of Tamilians: the ones who wear a vertical caste mark on their foreheads and worship Vishnu and are called Aiyangars, the ones who wear a horizontal caste mark, worship Shiva and are called Aiyars, the faded film stars turned politicians all of whom wear fur caps down to their ears and peer through dark glasses even at night, the non-brahmins, and the most troublesome of the lot – the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam the organisation which was responsible for killing Rajiv Gandhi and which almost succeeded in killing the Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratunga. This lot could belong to any of the first three groups of course since they form a political outfit. And then of course, there is Amma Jayalalitha better known as Puratchi Thalaivi, Kalaignar Dr. J Jayalalitha, never mind that she looks like a rather benign Patton Tank and is in fact neither benign nor a tank. She is the most corrupt politician in Tamil Nadu and has been convicted for sharp practice. Despite this and because of the crazy electoral system that we have she has been appointed the Chief Minister all over again by a Governor who was herself once a Supreme Court judge.

God’s Own Country as Kerala likes to call itself is much more staid and sedate when it comes to names. So while you have names like Kurien which is Syrian Christian you also have Karunakaran. Then there is Nair. Nice stable names. Beautiful people who look like they’ve been dipped in melted Cadbury milk-chocolate and smart as pungent green jalapeno peppers with hearts larger than themselves. The same applies to Assamese names.

For reasons best known to themselves Kashmiri’s almost always end their names with a U pronounced OO but shorter. That is the Hindu Kashmiris. Hence Nehru, Kitchloo, Chringoo and so on. When I first joined the State Bank of India as a young probationer my branch manager was a Kashmiri. He was bald as an egg and his head shone to a high gloss. His name was Chamanlal Ganjoo. Ganjoo means bald and Chaman means to shine. It was the first name I ever heard that described a person better than any description could. Muslims Kashmiri have Muslim names but they betray their origin with addenda like Butt. We had this wonderfully efficient Municipal Commissioner in Lucknow called Mehmood Butt. I liked Butt for his efficiency, not for the fact that his name said what my name said I was supposed to do.

The Punjabis are boring when it comes to names. Their names almost always end with Singh while their women are always called Kaur. This is of course redeemed by the fact that they have the most beautiful women in India – statuesque, sexy and well filled. It is only when someone like our former President, Gyani Zail Singh gets inventive that some fun can be hoped for from the first part of the name. The poor man did not even know how to spell Jail which is where he had been, defying the British. If only he knew that Jail is often spelt Gaol by the British he would have been well and truly flummoxed. So he named himself Zail Singh. Gyani means something like Professor but apart from knowing his Guru Granth of which no one ever had any doubts, there were plenty of doubts about his knowledge of anything else. There were never any doubts however about his devouring greed for power. Luckily the Indian Constitution did not allow him to do his worst.

The martial spirit of the Sikhs and their close connection with the Army makes for occasional names like Jarnail (meaning probably General) and Major Singh. So it is perfectly possible for the Indian Army to have a Major Major Singh or a General Jarnail Singh. During the 1962 war with the Chinese the most decorated name was that of Colonel Shaitan Singh, Shaitan meaning Devil which he apparently was to his adversaries on the front.

A name by any other…………….