Filling Forms

 

I have never been impressed by my name. A name should have a rhythm or some power for the one carrying it to be eminent. Check out any illustrious person's name. To illustrate, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and Veerapandya Kattabomman. Or how about Colonel Julius Nagendranath Wilfred Singh, which has everything? Mine has nothing. There was a Vice Admiral who had a very long name. So, in the Navy, they just called him A to Z Rao. Long names have one problem, though. Filling forms. There will not be enough space for all the alphabets. I will not even venture into the present-day Islamic royalties' names, whether UAE Sheiks or Malaysian Queen. School children there have to mug it up. What a task!

My father had some weird ideas. One idea, which he thought was progressive and nationalistic, was not to give me a surname. No caste, creed and all that you see. However, he carried one all along. Surnames are usually the name of the place, family name, father's name or the caste. I carry the family name. But that gets used as initials of my name. So that should come first. If so my first name becomes my surname! Maybe I should have reversed the whole thing. Then I would have a first, middle and a third name, the last one masquerading as the surname. With that, I could have introduced myself as "The name is Kandy, call me Kands". Yes, there is some style in it, now that I think of it. Also, form filling would have been easy, though I would have been known by a different name!

Another idea of his was to make me delete two alphabets from the first of my two worded family name while filling the form to join the Army. He didn't like the meaning of our family name, which is my mother's family name. To obscure it, he insisted on misspelling it. That deletion rendered the name meaningless. Also, I am sure that it must have played havoc with my numerology. Till date, I haven't checked the effect, of it anyway. Numerology also says it works on the name you are generally known by. For me, that is a mononym. So maybe numerology did not affect. Who knows!

My place of birth for the passport created a problem. The anglicised name was Badagara. The Britishers had made thigs easy. In vernacular, it did not make any difference either way. But when spelt in English, it could be Vatakara or Vadakara. In my earlier passport, it was with D. Later, I applied with T, for no apparent reason and not knowing that I would be in trouble. And I was, with that almost illiterate lady at the desk, in a government job. I had to tell her to make me talk to her boss. He looked a lot more decent, well dressed and seemed to understand. Hence, I got the passport. Whenever the name of a place is in the local language, there can arise a problem while filling up the form in English. One seemingly inconsequential letter can cause damage.

Mother tongue, I am sure, is an issue for many. I mean to the children. And it gets more complicated for the grandchildren. When the parents speak different languages, and the children do not even speak the mother's tongue, how does one fill that detail? In the Army, many children speak only Hindi and English, even though they have pedigree parents. How will they tick the boxes? Or worse, answer the queries of nosy elders!

Like mother tongue, there is a question of identity in inter-caste and inter-state marriages, what to talk of inter-religious, when it comes to "Religion" and "Caste". Say, the daughter of an Andhra-Bengali combination of different religions marries a Malayali. Their daughter marries the son of Tamil-Telugu combination of different castes. When the inquisitive teenaged son of such complicated combinations asked about his ancestry, to the explanation offered he said, "Dimag kharab ho raha hai, yaar".

He will have a tough time filling up his and his progeny's forms. God help him.