The name says it all

GEETA PADMANABHAN

The loud drilling noise awakens me in the afternoon. The apartment building in which I live is finally getting a name. For a year we pestered the builder for this. We suggested a number of names. Since we couldn't agree on any one name the builder decided to give it the name of the house which was demolished to build this. Nevertheless we are thrilled that our building now has a name .

What's in a name? asked Shakespeare. Plenty. The first thing a child learns when he/she begins to speak is naming words. Without these labels for people, places and things the world would be a confusing place. But Shakespeare meant something else. What he said was, a rose by any other name would be as sweet. With his prescience he must have guessed that his own name would often be mis-spelt. Was he Shakespear, Shakesphere, Sheikspear or Shakespere? But his fame lives on. Perhaps he was right. But our name is the proudest possession we have. I don't think any of us would like our name mispronounced or mis-spelt.

In literature as in real life we come across people with strange names. Have you read Rumpelstiltskin? Tom Thumb? Red Riding Hood? Cinderella? Dr. Dolittle? How do writers names their characters? It may be a good idea to research into this. We all know Charles Schulz's "Peanuts". But why did he choose the name "Rerun" for his brother? Charles Dickens gives a very interesting explanation to how his famous character Oliver Twist was named. Oliver's mother died at his birth. He was brought up in an orphanage. Mr. Bumble who was in charge of the orphanage had devised a system to find names for the orphans brought under his care "I invented them", he boasted, "we name our foundlings in alphabetical order. The last was S... Swabble, I named him. This was a T... Twist, I named him. The next one comes will be Unwin, the next Vilkins. I have got names ready-made to the end of the alphabet and all the way through it again when we come to Z." In that immortal saga of human spirit, Daniel Defoe's hero Robinson Crusoe named the slave he rescued Friday after the day on which he found him.

Many authors wrote under assumed names for various reasons. The reasons themselves make for interesting stories. Why did Mark Twain, the creator of the impish Tom Sawyer pick on this pen name? It has something to do with his journeys on the Mississippi river. A riverboat has a long cord with flags to measure the depth of the river. "Mark Twain (mark two) meant safe clearance for the riverboat. So Samuel Langhorne Clemens chose this name which not only recalled his life on the Mississippi river but had a reassuring "all's well" meaning. Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) who took us along with Alice to the wonderland of fresh ideas, fanciful words and freakish characters was given this name by the editor of the paper Train. Carroll comes from the word Charles (Carolus) and Lewis from Lutwidge (Ludivocus). George Eliot, who wrote the novel Mill on the Floss was actually Mary Anne Evans. She wrote under a man's name because at the time she wrote women did not write novels. Now try and find out why the genial vet of the Yorkshire Dales, James Alfred Wight wrote under the name James Herriot.

Family names are cherished as much as family treasures and there are organisations that will trace family history given the family name. Which is the most widely used name in the world? One survey says it is "Chang", the commonest in China. The interesting fact is that the British telephone directory has the maximum number of pages allotted to the name "Patel".

We in India trace our lineage through the names of our gothrams. Each gothram can be tracked back to a rishi after whom it was named thus proving all of us descendents of a group of sages. A man and a woman born under the same gothram are not allowed to marry as they are considered brother and sister.

Maybe we all have a common family name. All we have to do is to wait for the anthropologists to dig up the earliest man (woman?) to walk upright and give him/her a name. But what name? We should take a worldwide vote on this.

But let's not do any name-dropping, nor call each other names. Let's make a name for ourselves. And have plenty to our names. That's the name of the game.

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