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My first trouble with exotic names began with my schooling in the early 1950s.
You must remember that I was studying in a remote Village School and our medium of instruction was Telugu, out and out. All our text books other than English Prose and Poetry were printed in Telugu and taught in Telugu. Now, like so many Indian languages, Telugu doesn't have the printed equivalents of Cat, Mat, Rat and the like, since the 'a' sound that occurs there is alien to Telugu. So, they can't be transcribed into our mother tongue. Strange it may seem, Sanskrit-based Indian languages have about 56 alphabet compared to the 26 of English, yet no equivalent for 'mat'.
They find it hard even now to transcribe Axis Bank into Telugu script...it is either: "Aaxis Baank" or "Aexis Baenk" or worse, "Yaaxis Byaank".
So, here was this lesson on the newly established UNO with its Secretary General whose name we had to mug up, written as:
"Dog Hyammerhshield"
The Dog part of it was funny enough but Hammer and Shield did make sense for us. I wondered what funny names these English people have.
Actually, the poor chap wasn't English at all but Swedish and his good name happens to be:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dag_Hammarskj%C3%B6ld
Pretty decent home compared to my Nile Valley apartment, what?
But don't look down on my humble beginnings. I was born, not in the gloomy Sweden, but in a sunlit heavenly place in the Godavary River Backwaters, a town called Razole in the fabulous Konaseema:
http://www.konaseematourism.com/stay.php
So, what I lacked in mansions I made up in palm trees and sunny isles. Not too bad a birth place, if you don't mind the heat and the mosquitoes...but my son tells me there are mosquitoes, flies, rats and cockroaches even in New York Hotels, so I don't see I have to have any severe inferiority complex.
Now, my Father was not a Sastry...his name was Radhakrishnaiah (a mouthful). I was christened Prabhakar, which was sort of ok with me. But then my Father, for reasons best known to himself, tagged a Sastry at the end of my name when I was admitted to school. This is something I always resented because, as I grew up, this Sastry was a sure give-away that I was a Brahmin, and there was this terrific backlash against Brahmins by the time I went to college. It was a case of reverse discrimination and I suffered immensely from it.
I would have preferred a Rao as a tag-on since a Rao could be a Brahmin, like our ex-PM P. V. Narasimha Rao, a wily politician and scholar who was the only one to rule this country outside the Nehru-Gandhi family for a full term of five years, apart from Vajpayeejee, another wily Brahmin...the present PM is a very decent Sardarjee but, as the unkind say, he is a HMV thrown into the rough and tumble of politics willy-nilly.
And at the end of the Rao spectrum was our Kanta Rao, the office attendant in the Phy dept at KGP who was the only literate there in the 1980s. Unfortunately he came to a sticky end because of his enormous love for booze. His wife worked as a domestic help (servant maid) in our Qrs and was always in need of ready cash since her husband spent all his salary and more under the banyan tree outside the Puri Gate buying toddy for himself and his friends. One day, my wife said she didn't have cash but had a large number of Laddus and Sweetmeats since it was the festival of Durga Puja. And she can have a dozen of them.
But Mrs Kanta Rao looked dubious and asked my wife:
"Have you offered these Laddus to your Durga Mai? And are these Her Prasad?"
"Yes, of course, we don't eat anything before offering our cooked food to our Gods and Goddesses"
"Then I can't eat them...we are Christians, you know, and if our Pastor comes to know about it we will be ex-communicated and lose our weekly goodies from our Church."
So, that was that...Raos can be Christians as well.
But the day I joined IIT KGP in 1965, it was liberation for me from caste...as our Sunanada-da said:
"There is no caste in Bengal"
There was class-struggle alright ;-)
Anyway the moment I announced my name at KGP in 1965, they asked me if I was a close relative of the reigning PM, Lal Bahadur Shastri. I had to tell them proudly that I am a Brahmin and not a Kayashta like our PM...he was a Srivastava...his Sastry tag is like a degree like Ph D.
And then the Campus then was bristling with Sastrys...K. S. Sastry, G. L. N. Sastry, C. S. Sastry, V. U. K. Sastry, and later on B. S. Sastry, not to speak of another G. P. Sastry...a lamentable profusion of Sastrys. So, I was toying with the idea of changing my spelling as Psastry, like Psmith:
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http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2010/05/my-india-3-1950-55.html
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And then I had to teach DDT to my son in his Class X, by when it changed its name to the cute:
Ask wiki, if you don't believe me.
And this second young one has a prefix: Saswat....you know who?
http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2012/09/guest-column-who-is-gp-saswat-sarangi.html
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'We've met before. I never forget a face. Isn't your name Allen or Allenby or Alexander or something?'
'Wooster,' I said, relieved to the core. I had been anticipating a painful scene.
He clicked his tongue.
'I could have sworn it was something beginning with Al. It's this malaria of mine. Picked it up in equatorial Africa, and it affects my memory. So you've changed your name, have you? Secret enemies after you?'
'No, no secret enemies.'
'That's generally why one changes one's name. I had to change mine that time I shot the chief of 'Mgombis. In self-defence of course, but that made no difference to his widows and surviving relatives who were looking for me. If they had caught me, they would have roasted me alive over a slow fire, which is a thing one always wants to avoid. But I baffled them. Plank was the man they were trying to contact, and it never occurred to them that somebody called George Bernard Shaw could be the chap they were after. They are not very bright in those parts...
.....From: "Aunts Aren't Gentlemen"...PGW
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My first trouble with exotic names began with my schooling in the early 1950s.
You must remember that I was studying in a remote Village School and our medium of instruction was Telugu, out and out. All our text books other than English Prose and Poetry were printed in Telugu and taught in Telugu. Now, like so many Indian languages, Telugu doesn't have the printed equivalents of Cat, Mat, Rat and the like, since the 'a' sound that occurs there is alien to Telugu. So, they can't be transcribed into our mother tongue. Strange it may seem, Sanskrit-based Indian languages have about 56 alphabet compared to the 26 of English, yet no equivalent for 'mat'.
They find it hard even now to transcribe Axis Bank into Telugu script...it is either: "Aaxis Baank" or "Aexis Baenk" or worse, "Yaaxis Byaank".
So, here was this lesson on the newly established UNO with its Secretary General whose name we had to mug up, written as:
"Dog Hyammerhshield"
The Dog part of it was funny enough but Hammer and Shield did make sense for us. I wondered what funny names these English people have.
Actually, the poor chap wasn't English at all but Swedish and his good name happens to be:
Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjöld
I bet 100% of my readers won't be able to repeat his spelling in one attempt, not to speak of its pronunciation. Wiki also tells me that he came from an aristocratic Swedish family and his father was the Prime Minister of Sweden. Here is the house he was born in:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dag_Hammarskj%C3%B6ld
Pretty decent home compared to my Nile Valley apartment, what?
But don't look down on my humble beginnings. I was born, not in the gloomy Sweden, but in a sunlit heavenly place in the Godavary River Backwaters, a town called Razole in the fabulous Konaseema:
http://www.konaseematourism.com/stay.php
So, what I lacked in mansions I made up in palm trees and sunny isles. Not too bad a birth place, if you don't mind the heat and the mosquitoes...but my son tells me there are mosquitoes, flies, rats and cockroaches even in New York Hotels, so I don't see I have to have any severe inferiority complex.
Now, my Father was not a Sastry...his name was Radhakrishnaiah (a mouthful). I was christened Prabhakar, which was sort of ok with me. But then my Father, for reasons best known to himself, tagged a Sastry at the end of my name when I was admitted to school. This is something I always resented because, as I grew up, this Sastry was a sure give-away that I was a Brahmin, and there was this terrific backlash against Brahmins by the time I went to college. It was a case of reverse discrimination and I suffered immensely from it.
I would have preferred a Rao as a tag-on since a Rao could be a Brahmin, like our ex-PM P. V. Narasimha Rao, a wily politician and scholar who was the only one to rule this country outside the Nehru-Gandhi family for a full term of five years, apart from Vajpayeejee, another wily Brahmin...the present PM is a very decent Sardarjee but, as the unkind say, he is a HMV thrown into the rough and tumble of politics willy-nilly.
And at the end of the Rao spectrum was our Kanta Rao, the office attendant in the Phy dept at KGP who was the only literate there in the 1980s. Unfortunately he came to a sticky end because of his enormous love for booze. His wife worked as a domestic help (servant maid) in our Qrs and was always in need of ready cash since her husband spent all his salary and more under the banyan tree outside the Puri Gate buying toddy for himself and his friends. One day, my wife said she didn't have cash but had a large number of Laddus and Sweetmeats since it was the festival of Durga Puja. And she can have a dozen of them.
But Mrs Kanta Rao looked dubious and asked my wife:
"Have you offered these Laddus to your Durga Mai? And are these Her Prasad?"
"Yes, of course, we don't eat anything before offering our cooked food to our Gods and Goddesses"
"Then I can't eat them...we are Christians, you know, and if our Pastor comes to know about it we will be ex-communicated and lose our weekly goodies from our Church."
So, that was that...Raos can be Christians as well.
But the day I joined IIT KGP in 1965, it was liberation for me from caste...as our Sunanada-da said:
"There is no caste in Bengal"
There was class-struggle alright ;-)
Anyway the moment I announced my name at KGP in 1965, they asked me if I was a close relative of the reigning PM, Lal Bahadur Shastri. I had to tell them proudly that I am a Brahmin and not a Kayashta like our PM...he was a Srivastava...his Sastry tag is like a degree like Ph D.
And then the Campus then was bristling with Sastrys...K. S. Sastry, G. L. N. Sastry, C. S. Sastry, V. U. K. Sastry, and later on B. S. Sastry, not to speak of another G. P. Sastry...a lamentable profusion of Sastrys. So, I was toying with the idea of changing my spelling as Psastry, like Psmith:
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The young man sighed.
"Ah,
well," he said, "we must always remember that these disappointments are
sent to us for some good purpose. No doubt they make us more spiritual.
Will you inform her that I called? The name is Psmith. P-smith."
"Peasmith. sir?"
"No,
no. I should explain to you that I started my life without the initial
letter, and my father always clung ruggedly to the plain Smith. But it
seemed to me that there were so many Smiths in this world that a little
variety might well be introduced. Smythe I look on as a cowardly
evasion, nor do I approve of the too prevalent custom of tacking another
name on in front by means of a hyphen. So I decided to adopt the
Psmith. The p, I should add for your guidance, is silent, as in
phthisis, psychic, and ptarmigan. You follow me/"
"Y-yes, sir."
"You don't think," he said anxiously, "that I did wrong in pursuing this course?"
"N-no sir."
"Splendid!" said the young man, flicking a speck of dust from his coat-sleeve. "Splendid! Splendid!"
....From "Leave it to Psmith" by PGW
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Among the name-changers, for better or worse, is Sam Pitroda, christened:
Satyanarayan Gangaram Pitroda
And of course, S. D. Harry of IIT KGP Campus, the petrol pump owner after which now the popular eatery stands. His christened name was:
Hari Das Sur
...an out and out Bengali name.
And for the Thackers of the bookstall, the original spelling was:
"Thakkers"
...an out and out Gujju name.
And for a long time, I thought Indira Gandhi married one of the sons of Mahatma Gandhi...no, sir, she married a Parsi by name Feroze Gandhi, against the will of her father Nehru. Feroze proved to be a thorn in the Parliamentary flesh of his F-i-L, inspecting the Congress drains and dredging up the earliest scams of Free India...we heard of the Dalmia Scoop, the Mundhra Deal, the TTK dirty tricks and LIC fiasco. Poor chap died early, to the relief of the ruling Congress.
God has always been kind to me and my Uncle didn't admit me in Chemistry. The nomenclature of Chemistry simply stumped me from my school days:
I always abhorred the Telugu
translations of our Science Books. Even at that tender age, I could see
that English would soon be the Ultimate Leveler after 'Death'. But our
Chemistry authors were blind in their enthusiasm for their Mother
Tongue: Hydrogen would be 'Udajani'. Nitrogen would be 'Nathrajani' . Oxygen would be 'Amlajani'. They would go so far as Carbon Dioxide as the repulsive: 'Karbanadwiamlajanidamu' .
But they luckily wrung their hands and gave up when it came to
'Dichloro-Diphenyl-Trichloro-Ethane', and just rendered it: DDT, thanks.
Now, this DDT was all over our lives. We ate it, drank it, and breathed it. For, the rice and vegetable fields were 'sprayed' with this Universal Pesticide, wells and water bodies were 'chlorinated' with this Insecticide, and the air we breathed was 'fumigated' with this 'Disinfectant'. All our lives were touched by this 'miracle' invention, that gave a Nobel for its inventor. American surpluses of WW II were dumped on our Muthukur with a vengeance.
Now, this DDT was all over our lives. We ate it, drank it, and breathed it. For, the rice and vegetable fields were 'sprayed' with this Universal Pesticide, wells and water bodies were 'chlorinated' with this Insecticide, and the air we breathed was 'fumigated' with this 'Disinfectant'. All our lives were touched by this 'miracle' invention, that gave a Nobel for its inventor. American surpluses of WW II were dumped on our Muthukur with a vengeance.
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And then I had to teach DDT to my son in his Class X, by when it changed its name to the cute:
1,1,1-trichloro-2,2-di(4-chlorophenyl)ethane
Thanx!
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And then there were these two Sarangis at IIT KGP:
One was my student in the late 1960s (now a big shot) and the other in the late 1990s (a bigger shot). Everyone I knew called them by their spelling which sounded like that musical instrument:
And for reasons best known to themselves, they kept quiet about it.
But I knew that their names are pronounced:
"Shodangi"
because we had a Sanskrit Professor at AU by that name. He was an Oriya Brhamin pundit and his name meant he was an expert in the Six Vedangas:
The Vedanga ( vedāṅga, "limbs of the Veda") are six auxiliary disciplines traditionally associated with the study and understanding of the Vedas.
- Shiksha (śikṣā): phonetics, phonology and morphophonology (sandhi)
- Kalpa (kalpa): ritual
- Vyakarana (vyākaraṇa): grammar
- Nirukta (nirukta): etymology
- Chandas (chandas): meter
- Jyotisha (jyotiṣa): astronomy
And this second young one has a prefix: Saswat....you know who?
http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2012/09/guest-column-who-is-gp-saswat-sarangi.html
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