I used to think Indians preference for "whiter" sounding nicknames was an underlying condition. Its actually a survival tactic in a racist world
Representation pic/Getty Images
I needed a good driver in Bali for a week. The year was 1999 and the plan was to celebrate my son's second birthday on the idyllic island of Bali. We'd stay at Kuta rather than sloppy, slobby Denpasar with its belching fat foreigners, and explore Bali by car. For this, we needed a driver.
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I found a website called the Bali Travel Forum where those who'd visited Bali shared advise and tips with those who were headed there. I posted a simple query: Need a great driver in Bali in January. Recommendations welcome. Gopi.
Three days later, not a single response. I reposted the query, another week passed and then I began to wonder about the silence. On a hunch, I posted the query a third time, but now signed off as Mac instead of Gopi. Within hours, the replies started flying in.
Really? I had to be a John or a Jack to be recognised as one of the species? My mind went back to an evening in Wales when two slightly tipsy policemen in a village called Llandeilo, suspecting I was up to no good, tried to extract my name and book me. But Chitoor Yegnanarayan Gopinath proved to be a headbanger. They left in tatters.
My interest in why Indians feel they've arrived only when they have "whiter" nicknames goes back to college days. Siddharth became Sid and Sandeep Sandy. Jagdish was a somebody only as Jack, and Aniruddh stood tall as Andy. In the hostel, a certain Jagannath was Django, Vikram was Vicky, and Bharat was of course Bert. A true-born Palghat Iyer I know called Krishnamoorthy is looking sharp in Silicon Valley today but as a Kris, but we were never told why a Jaitirth was better off as Jerry or a Natarajan as Nat. We even had a Rakesh who inexplicably became a Tony.
When the Election Commission released 18 terabytes of data from the last census, a young start-up called Modak Analytics got their hands on 81 crore Indian names.
The commonest Indian first name, they learnt, was Ramesh, and not Anil or Arun, as I'd feared. Other oddities: the name Srinivas is spelt 600 different ways in Andhra Pradesh, and about three lakh Gujarati women have Gita Ben as their first name.
It does seem that the human imagination flops spectacularly when it comes to names, which explains why our worlds are full of Anils, Aruns, Rajus and Rameshes. But the rest of the world does no better — the Middle East is awash with Mohammads and Abduls, and the Caucasian universe has its Johns, Jacks, Davids and Jims.
So what's the lure of a western sounding name? Brevity, it seems. The longer the name, the greater the risk of misspelling. I could not transact at my bank for a year because someone had taken my middle name to be Yegnanarayanan, with an extra an at the end, while my passport name was two letters shorter. The computer choked on this and decided I wasn't myself.
Things came to a head when we finally travelled to the USA and one evening visited my father's ex-colleague, now an immigrant living with his family in Buffalo. Last seen in Kirti Nagar, New Delhi, as a sturdy Punjabi in full bloom, the gentleman had migrated with wife, sons and a suitcase to the land of opportunity. Towards the end of our visit, he summoned his son out to greet us. "Bob!!" he shouted, and Bob, formerly Pradhyumnan, appeared sheepishly to say hello.
Xian Zhao, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, decided to continue with his Chinese name, which means "outstanding", though his cousin and his aunt changed their names from Pengyuan and Guiqing to Jason and Susan, respectively.
But Zhao was intrigued by people's reactions to names, both their own and others', and did research into the relationship between someone's first name and whether people would offer them help in hypothetical life-and-death situations.
In one experiment, he gave about 850 white American citizens the trolley problem, in which an out-of-control train is about to run over five people on the tracks. Pulling a lever to divert it would save them but kill a helpless individual on another track. The identities of the five and the one were varied — for instance, the individual was referred to as either an Asian immigrant named Xian, an Asian immigrant named Mark, or a white male named Mark.
Participants cheerfully killed off the Xian. Only the Marks were deemed worth saving.
Defiant in the face of sensible advice, I have stuck by my unwieldy handle, paying a heavy price at immigration counters and Starbucks everywhere. But I was re-baptised recently by a friend's little Thai daughter.
Unable to say Gopi, she routinely pronounces me Goofy.
Here, viewed from there. C Y Gopinath, in Bangkok, throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai, the city that raised him. You can reach him at cygopi@gmail.com
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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper
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