What's in a name?

I receive a call on my mobile, “May I speak to Mr. Jagdish Kumar Mathur?” I was about to say “Wrong number.” but remembered instantly – it is my name, my full name which is not used much except while opening bank accounts or applying for various instruments of governmental or organizational recognitions like appointment letters or renewal of passports, driving license etc. or buying shares and bonds, filing affidavits, and acquiring registered deeds. My close friends and relatives call me JK, which is fine with me. This form of indulgence gives me a feeling of warmth. My mother used to call me Jagdish, some times Jaggu when she felt a little more affectionate towards me; my father always said Jagdish in his characteristic stentorian voice In short, no body calls me Mr. Jagdish Kumar Mathur, except in jest or in a manner of sarcasm in the course of an argument, which is also fine with me. My bosses and superiors, as also my colleagues, use my surname ‘Mathur’ to invite my attention, prefixing ‘Mr.’ whenever they feel a little kind and generous.

It is not the practice in civil society to address anyone by one’s full nomenclature stretched to the first, middle and the last names, except by the Johnnies with headphones at the call centers equipped with complete lists of names and telephone numbers. These blokes are quite confused when it comes to ‘name-calling’. They are in a country where the inhabitants boast of a bewildering variety of names. Some names contain not only the first name and the caste but also the name of the father and village of origin.



[Caption: Alexander Graham Bell inaugurates AT&T's telephone service between New York and Chicago in October 1892 and unleashes call center monsters upon the unsuspecting world.]


Things are not much different with the letters received in junk mail. Such mail is generated in very large volumes on the computers by a technique known as ‘mail merging’. A complete list of full names and addresses is prepared and kept in the memory running into gigabytes from where the name of the targeted individual is put on the letter while his name and address is incorporated on the envelope. Whenever I receive a neatly word-processed letter addressing me with my full name, I hasten to consign it to the trashcan. What gets my goat is the callous and casual approach adopted in such letters that crowd the mailbox these days. Nobody thought of training these fly-by-night correspondents, who are more often than not out-sourced, to adhere to the basics of letter writing or the forms of addressing various personages.

There is a noteworthy new trend that encourages minor changes in the spelling of your name, as suggested by Numerology, to bring good luck. You may call it the Ektaa Kapoor syndrome. This name-game has caught the imagination of those who are upwardly mobile and want to succeed in the rat race of out-smarting each other. They consult the soothsayers and crystal- gazers, mind readers and palm-perusers who claim to dabble in predictions and various tricks to bolster the fortunes of the ‘believers’. Most of them are in the ‘I told you so’ category. This latest craze was started by the so-called ‘queen of family soaps.’ Her Saas-Bahu serials, starting with the K-word and atrocious spellings where a particular alphabet recurs in a very irrational way, have achieved unprecedented TRP ratings. Nothing succeeds like success; nobody seems to mind, rather every one wishes to ride on the bandwagon.

The name-jugglers say that a name emits certain vibrations that can be changed by altering its spelling. They proclaim that your birth date vibrations should match with the vibrations of your name in order to produce harmony so necessary for smooth sailing in life. Each alphabet has in it a particular numerical value and the aggregate value of these numbers should tally with the total value of the birth date numbers.

Newspapers and magazines have reported that prominent persons who wanted to excel a little bit more preferred preposterous changes in the spellings of their names in consonance with what is perpetrated by their Numerological advisers. They belong to the elite groups in the cross-sections of our society. Even ebullient editors, flamboyant filmmakers, aspiring film stars, and already successful writers, who are apparently not satisfied with their present achievements, have succumbed to the temptations of this seemingly quick-fix solution.

Once, I too fell into the trap of this short cut to success and made some quick calculations with the help of books on Numerology. Accordingly, I changed the spelling of my name from Jagdish to Jugdish. However, the results were not palatable. First of all, my family members and friends started calling me in derision as Jugdish with added emphasis on the syllable ‘Ju’. When I went to get my new visiting cards printed, the printer pointed out the ‘mistake’ and had to be convinced that every thing was fine with the new-fangled spelling. My bank manager grew suspicious of my intentions when he got my new card and carefully noted ‘caution’ on my account. My friends wanted clarification on my latest ‘goof-up’ and had to be explained the logic behind the change; they however nodded their head and thought I needed help of a different kind. What is worse, the tide in my affairs which was expected to be ‘taken at the flood leading me to fortune’ never materialized. I have, therefore, reverted to the original spelling of my name, which I now realize has served me very well all these years.

While I am concluding this piece, I get another call on my mobile. A female voice enquires, “May I speak to Mr. Jagdish Kumar Mathur…” Soon after, there is a knock on my door. A letter couriered to me reads “Dear Mr. Jagdish Kumar Mathur…”