Shakespeare Gets it Wrong Now and Then

(Published in Zeitgeist, The New Indian Express, dated 5th September, 2009)

“I don’t even know these people!!! I mean, what the hell? Roschelle?!” my friend’s face was first puzzled, then angry, then quietly appreciative of his sense of poetry, while all of us wondered whether he was doing the British ‘apples and pears’-equal-to-‘stairs’, ‘Britney Spears’-equal-to-‘beer’ thing. Or the American, "no way, Jose!" thing. You’ve got to admit, ‘what the hell, Roschelle!’ has a ring to it.

“What…is a Roschelle?” he asked, looking at a piece of fancy stationery.

“Oh! Oh! Roschelle!” I came to life, “that’s…”

“A brand of Swiss chocolate?” another friend offered, “are they opening a store here?”

“No, Roschelle’s not an ‘it’!” I said, “it’s a she…uh…”

“Uh…Roschelle is not a ‘she’. It’s a groom!” the friend who was trying to figure out which wedding he was invited to, said.

“WHAT?!” and all of us pored over the invite. After intense scrutiny, and a search of social networking sites, we decided a man named Roschelle was unlikely to have friends, and had decided to send out invitations by the (phone) book.

It might be a source of comfort to him, if he happens to read this, whoever he is, that he is not alone in his misery.

Maybe months of being sick, clothes one cannot fit into, kicks in the gut, nightmares of being fat for life and scary scenes of childbirth from sitcoms and pulp movies leave women bitter enough to avenge their newborns by naming them. Or maybe it’s that the fathers get so nervous they can’t quite think and come up with the first word or object they can think of. Or the grandparents are upset they couldn’t name their own children, and the deprivation has had a lasting psychological impact. But whatever it is, some children are doomed from the start.

I logged on to a networking site after a four-month hiatus, and discovered three of my friends had had babies, and a couple of them had status messages about going nuts trying to pick a name.

“Oh, that’s a scary thing,” a friend of mine said, “I know someone called Rhythm.”“Rhythm? Like Hridim or something, or like ‘rhymth and blues’?”

“Oh, his sister is called Blues!” my friend said. Turns out their parents tried really hard at being musicians, and decided they would produce R&B one way or the other.

It was a story I refused to believe till I saw a Page 3 (or whatever the local alternative is) picture of Rhythm with his girlfriend (Jazz?)

Then, of course, there is the Ganesh-Dinesh-Mahesh syndrome. As a child, I knew a couple of sisters called Shruthi and Dhvani. When their mother discovered a third was on the way, guess what name the child was endowed with…yes, full points for Smrithi. It could have turned out to be a Princess September story, but the mother chose to act wisely. Instinct tells me she’d have started naming further offspring, if they had chosen to spring, after the ragams.

And then, there was this Sanskritisation syndrome. I have a feeling it all began with someone flipping open a religious text after a lot of hair-tearing and nail-chewing, in the hope God would solve the dilemma. Now, kindergartens are crawling with Dhrishtis, Shrishtis, Saattviks, and possibly Rajases and even Tamases (for the kids that turn out rather more base than their procreators hoped).

But one must give credit to the Egyptians. In defiance of the millions of Arabic names waiting to be chosen, they’ve populated the country with just three names – Khaled, Omar and Sharif. And after four years of my bringing up the topic everyday, my friend Khaled chose to name his first-born Hassan. Apparently, they’re facing quite a challenge with his passport.