The naming of the Rose

Mao Tse-Tung or more properly Mao Zedong, aka Chairman Mao has a relationship with me.
We both have our patronym put down as our first name.
In the West, he should have been Zedong Mao. (For years I used to feel very comradely to him because I thought I was ‘addressing’ him by his first name, Mao.)

In the South of India, where I was born, the custom in many communities is to have your father’s name first followed by your given name. This complicates things a bit in the modern world as now your surname is your ‘christian’ name and you are also called that by your friends, unless you have a nickname as well. 
I am called Shanta by my friends. This is short for Shantakumar which is my given name. My father’s name is Venkataraman, so in this tradition, it goes first. So I am Venkataraman Shantakumar. Since this is a mouthful in itself, I just write V. Shantakumar. 
All clear so far?
But when I go to websites or I have to fill in forms that ask me to write my first name (followed by my last name,) I get confused. Should I put Shanta, Shantakumar, Venkataraman, or just V?
If I filled in  Shanta, and say I had joined the army, name tags or references afterwards would be Shanta Shantakumar. Which at roll call would make me sound  not just silly, but really insecure as if to say that I need repetition to assure myself and all there that I am present and accounted for.
If I said Shantakumar that would be even worse, a little like Major Major in Catch 22. 
Venkataraman is my father’s name . And while I am proud to be his son, God rest his soul, I am not sure I want to be him every time some addresses me.
That leaves V. And I am often referred to as V  by anonymous people/ oompah-loompahs that I presume reside in websites like Amazon and Google who say Dear V and proceed to sell me something or the other.

I like V. Only because I saw a movie called V  where the hero was this masked anarchist, sort of a cross between Guy Fawkes and Zorro who wanted to start some  sort of revolution which ends up as a flash mob in front of the Houses of Westminster, and that too without benefit of Twitter or Facebook. I was impressed. 
I fancy myself as a bit of an anarchist, and ever since I saw and even produced/ acted in an amateur production of Dario Fo’s play, Accidental Death of an Anarchist, I think these people should be commended for helping some chaos. After all isn’t that what the primordial  soup-gloop was all about that created  us?
But I digress!

However it is all somewhat unsatisfactory.
The real problem lies in the turbulent waters where the complacent rivers of tradition meet the flash floods of modernity.
In the olde days, and here I refer to say half a century ago, the way my name would have been written would be something like this:
Mannargudi Venkataraman Shantakumar Subramaniam Aiyar.
That mouthful  is perfect to establish place of origin : Mannargudi, (ancestral village), Fathers name ( we have been there), Shantakumar , Subramaniam (my paternal grandfather’s name which i  will elucidate shortly) and Aiyar(last but not least the defining caste name).
And scientifically it is probably as clear as any detailed speciation nomenclature  that Mendel could have done. We would know immediately without recourse to PIN’s, fingerprinting or retinal scans that I was I and no one else. After all you had at least 4 unique variables and in my ace a fifth one thrown in for good measure. In combination the odds against another MVSSA being found,at least in the same latitude, would be as much as me winning the Spanish Gordo!
At this point a note on Shantakumar versus Subramaniam is warranted. Shantakumar as I said was the name I was given when I was born. However, this was more like radical hippie parents giving their child a name like Rainbow or Sky or Hiawatha. It was good but not kosher. So when I reached the time when in  Indian Hindu Brahmin custom  a ceremony is performed that is roughly equivalent to a  Bar Mitzvah , an ordaining into the faith if you will which is called an “Upanaynam”, I was given the name which should have been given earlier to me if my father wasn’t metaphorically wearing long hair and tie-dyed jeans. This name is specifically chosen in order to quickly establish one’s genealogy  and is also a God’s name. (Do try to remember that there are quintillion Gods and Goddesses in the Hindu Pantheon with wonderfully evocative names each symbolizing their one great power and/or virtue.)  Subramaniam, also son of Shiva, is my paternal Grandfather’s name. That name in his case if he was the first born son in the family would have been his paternal grandfathers name and so on . You get the drift? The second son gets  the maternal grandfathers name.The third son I have no clue about but I am sure it was equally logical. The daughter followed a similar principle with the grandmothers coming into play.
So Place of Origin,Father, Grandfather and Caste. This system should if it had been followed accurately take one back a few generations for sure.
But here I was a child of the twentieth century, and in trying to be a progressive family and member of an developing eclectic society, the caste name was the first casualty. The place name in an era of ever increasing mobility went next. And then the whole ‘whispered-in-your-ear this is your talismanic name’ etc was found redundant.
So  my school had me registered as Venkataraman Shantakumar, which became V Shantakumar. My parents called me Kumar, and in school friends starred calling me Shanto, a Bengali pronunciation of the first half of my name, as there were too many Kumar’s about and finally today , putting on my deepest voice, I say, “Call me Shanta!”

I think of ,myself as Shanta these days. I probably thought of myself as Kumar when I was a boy of 10 or so.  And occasionally in an outburst of formality I say Shantakumar. But here I am inspire of all this hopeless confusion.

So what’s in a name, then?  I presumably smell as good as I ever will, no matter what I am called.

Here is the rub: numerologists!

These are the  people who now populate the dimension between Asrtology/Palmistry and Tarot/Rune reading.
I have nothing against any of them. I find the idea of the conflict between random chance and manifest destiny very interesting. I vacillate between resignation to unknown fate and  certainty of the power of my intention. I am also keenly aware that circumstance does not or at least it should not be master of my attitude.

But I confess to bemusement at the numerologists. No numerologist has yet won a lottery, say the Gordo referred to earlier, even though it’s all about the numbers.

They will of course tell you and me that it’s not about the numbers alone, it’s to do with the individual’s specific make up,” raasi’s “, their karmic DNA if you will.  And that’s how they know that no 5 is your lucky no and that 3 means your number is up or something like that. 
But they go further.
They will tell you that the reason you have been benighted by fate is because your name is spelt wrong. There is an A where there should have been an AE. Or one K , uh-huh, won’t cut it. Two is called for. So for example i should now spell my name as Kkumar. Try saying that with a stutter.

So the other day when I met this old friend of mine, I was surprised that he now spelt his name as Viveck and not Vivek.  He stills pronounces the name as Vi ( as in Victoria) and Vek as in wake with a v.  If you didn’t know you might now reading off his name card, call him Viv- eck, as in the sound heck, making him sound vaguely Slavic.

And another close friend of mine changed the spelling of her name too. Amba , pronounced Am as in approximately Um and Ba said baa, became Ambba. One would not know how to say this, except pause and stress the first syllable  and be somewhat reluctant to get to the second.

Now the reasons for these are obviously cosmic, beyond the ken  of us less attuned people who cannot sense that the universe is not particularly pleased with the way one’s name is spelt and this non-synchronization to invisible frequencies by one’s written but not oral name is keeping one from achieving fame,fortune and  the true meaning of life.

And here is the real kicker. This is the English transliteration of an Indian name, originally conceived in the sound  and alphabet of Sanskrit or Urdu or Tamil or any of the fabulous tongues of this vast country.
The numerologist uses numerical values based on old pre-English texts and then based on a still- unexplained transposition , converts them to English. Incidentally in Hindi, Viveck would still be written Vivek and Ambba as Amba. 
we seem to be in the realm where the bandersnatch and the jabberwocky frolic .
But who am I to argue? I mean if you want to, on your own or on the advice of a paid numerologist change the spelling of your name or even the whole name say from Joseph to Yousef, you are welcome.

I mean,think!  Would  anyone have taken Alois Schicklgruber seriously? 
For that matter 70 years on would anyone name their child Adolf or claim to be descended from the illustrious family of Hitler?

It may give us some psychical comfort to have a name or a name spelt in a way that increased our chances of success or happiness in a cruel,unfeeling,random world.

So I shouldn’t be contrarian about all this.
Let the double B’s and extra C’s fall where they will, as they do very often in lingerie shops!

But when they start telling us what car to buy based on what the initial letter of our first name is, that’s when I draw the line and demand explanation as did the Roman envoy to Antiochus Epiphanes.

And this advice is not published in the free wheeling  internet, which as we know has opinions on everything including the Idea that the world is flat.
This numerological treatise is published in the largest selling English daily in India as a full article, not as part of one’s daily horoscope which you could choose or reject with the same gravity as a tea biscuit.. The forum lends gravitas.

If you have a name beginning with K or C you should not have a Car with a brand name that begins withH: Honda and Hyundai are warned. Now close friends of mine are Keith and Christine, married to  each other. And his favorite machine is a Honda!  (And to be truthful, the car has had two small accidents since they bought it. And I can reveal that when he saw this article, Keith  shivered in doubt albeit just for a moment.) The article then with all seriousness of purpose continues with other letters of the alphabet , matching initials to cars, much like a key swapping suburban orgy. For example,if S then no M, or something like that, which would have made the Marquis de Sade a little disappointed. And so on in that vein.

On the other hand this may be a good thing after all. 

I am now going to propose that  given the numerological properties of the country and its Raasi, the next Prime Minister of India  must have a name  that begins with Z. This is the only name that will bring prosperity to the nation and restore honesty to politics.
Because at letter no 26,it is the very last chance we will ever have. And also the letter doesn’t exist in any form in any of the major Indian languages as well, so it’s perfectly suited to be spelt any which way you want.

Written 2012