Shakespeare said “What’s in a name ? A Rose by any name will smell as sweet” .
Well, I say, there is everything in a name. What would Edvige Antonia Albina Màino have been had she not changed her name to Sonia Gandhi ?
Try as you might it is extremely difficult to explain to a north Indian that, South of Vindhyas, a name just consisted of two parts, one was your name and the other was one or a group of letters which was simply called initials, ie the full name was not used anywhere. Well the documentation calls for a full name. So a Punjabi ends up calling someone, Gangaikondan or hardanahalli, thinking he is on a ‘first name basis’ ; first name comes first isn’t it ? Not always. I had a class mate VAB Raghunathan and what his initials meant we never knew, and one day we learnt that he also was not aware.
That was when the odd teacher we had from Punjab, had set about the task of educating himself on the naming conventions in the South. After asking all the boys as to what their initials meant, he thought he had got a grip over name, patronym village-nym, family name caste name and so on. Too bad that just then, he got bowled by the system followed by Chettiyaars who usually took the first two letters (instead of one) of their father’s name as initials; A child of Annamalai becomes AN Somename. That was the last straw. He left it as a bad joke and said with a big relief ‘my initials are ASR , and thank God, it is all my name ‘Amrit Surya Ram’
When I joined NDA, I became aware that I too had a difficult name to remember.. ” Subramanian Muralidharan’ . Every problem carries with it an opportunity. At NDA you had the sergeants at every 100 yards looking for law-breakers; that is , cadets who have a speck of dirt in their hankies or cadets running too slowly or may be cadets trying to run too fast when yelled at to stop ! The defaulters had to hand over their identity slips or I-slips as it was called, to the sergeants and then keep reporting to them to retrieve the I-slip.
This is where my name came to my rescue. As a lost case, I was generally on the wrong side of Academy-law. I had two sets of I-slips. For every one of S Muralidharan there were two of M Subramanian. While I was known in my squadron by the former name the latter one functioned as the decoy for other squadron types. It all worked very well till the better part of the second term; A sergeant looking for an elusive M.Subramanian in my squadron would lose interest after some days.
One fine day just as S Muralidharan was reporting to one sergeant, another swooped on him from no where ,’So, Subramaniam, got you at last.” I didn’t have to try too hard to give a lost look. There ensued some animated discussion between my tormentors , on my real identity and in the process anger gradually led to sheer amusement so much so that I ceased to be a defaulter and found myself explaining with an air of authority on the naming oddities in the South.
The idea of Free Software Foundation and Open Source Software has never ceased to amaze me. Mostly Free Software is understood as Free in ‘free of cost’ rather than free as in ‘Freedom’ which means much more. I would say , ‘Mukt and Muft’!!