Like many other browns I know, my name seems to bring out the worst in other people. When I taught elementary school in Brooklyn, an older colleague insisted on calling me “Ms. R.” “I don’t mean to offend,” he explained, “but if I try saying your last name, I know I’ll just sound silly.” Well, now you just sound like an idiot, I thought. A similar encounter occurred during my first week of graduate school, when the Dean approached me and introduced herself. I told her my name, and she asked, “Why couldn’t your parents just name you Molly or Jane?” Yes, I know, Naina Ramajayan…so difficult to pronounce, that even I just call myself ‘The N.’ It’s all pretty ironic, actually; considering that I’m a southie Hindu, my name is about as simple as it gets.
Thankfully, the baggage that comes with my name is fairly harmless, and I’m able to laugh it off. No one has ever looked at my name and suggested that I be targeted for homeland security. Some of my friends from college, however, haven’t been as lucky. When my friend Rahul Shah introduced himself to his co-worker a while ago, she responded, “Like, as in, the Shah of Iran, that Holocaust denier?” (Oh yes, she did.) Another friend felt pressured to start using his middle name at work because his boss joked that his first name, Amit, sounded like ‘Ahmed.’ And so what if does? “Dude,” he explained, “Three of the 9-11 hijackers were named Ahmed.” Amit, Ahmed, Shah, Iran…looks like the code is finally getting cracked.
I used to think these issues concerning names were a burden only for us brown people. But then I learned that Senator Barack Obama of Illinois is in a similar predicament. CNN did a nice story a few weeks ago (you can view the clip here) on the “controversy” surrounding the Senator’s name. Since Obama rhymes with Osama, Barack rhymes with Iraq (and Chirac), and Hussein is his middle name, he’s evidently a newly-discovered threat to the United States. After watching that clip, I felt guilty for thinking my buddy Amit was just being paranoid of his boss all these years. In fact, now I’m even more paranoid than I ever was before. Of rampant stupidity, that is. Aasif Mandvi appeared on the Daily Show on Tuesday night to bring his perspective on Obama-Osama-gate.
My favorite line: Aasif Mandvi? Yikes, I sound like trouble. People, keep your eye on me.
Jokes aside, I have to wonder: if Barack’s name — or any of our names, for that matter — rhymed with McVeigh, Rudolph, or Kaczynski, would any of this even be a topic of discussion?
I think this is a sensitive issue for a lot of us. Personally, I have always liked my name. In fact, the older I get, the more I love it. But I have, unfortunately, faced “fear” because of my name. When my husband and I travel (he is Jewish American) the bag with my name tag on it routinely gets searched by the TSA while his does not. In fact, we once switched the tags on our bags to see if one with my name on it would get searched again, and it did, even though he had held it and it contained all of his things. Personally, I would love to see someone who isn’t named John or William or Andrew or whatever as President because I like to think that it would loosen the country up when it comes to seeing “unique” or “ethnic” names.
By the way, Naina, I like your name. My first name has only five letters as well and it still takes some people several times to say it properly, so you’re not alone. I’ve encountered this so much that I’ve come up with rhyming analogies to help them along.
dude. our only problem is name mispronounced or folks not wanting to put in the effort to say it right. the asians have it even worse; they all don’t look alike, and they all don’t just come from china.
Shlok, seriously dude, you’ve never been confused for an Arab?
All us brown people look alike to Mr. and Mrs. America just as much as any other non-pink shade.
That small price to pay to enjoys the many postive things about living in the west.
I named my daughter Angela and I was called a sellout by some in the punjabi community.
My full name is Sukhjiwan, but when I started school my parents made it smaller to Suki. I have been Suki since, and very few of my friends even new my full name. My licence does say Sukhjiwan still but most other important papers say Suki.My Brother full name was Mandeep and my sister full name is Karendeep. Yet since they were kids my brother has been known as Deep and my sister as Karen, and I can’t recall the last time anyone has used there full names.
I don’t know if this relates to this. The area where I was born there were a large community of russian immigrants and alot of my russian-canadian friends had russian names that they changed or made shorter to more Canadian sounding names.
Suraj – has been called:(I swear, not a single one of them are made up)
1.Surje 2.Suraaaaj 3.Surah(people who say this, think they have cracked the code…looks like mexican(??!!), so “j” should be “h”) 4.Siraj 5.Surag 6.Surrraaaj (few who think, the ‘r’ should be a rolling ‘r’)
Now..that’s my first name. And some insist they want to call me by my last name….I happily, willfully and with quite an excited anticipation..offer them my family name on a ‘silver plate’… KURTAKOTI…take that!!
i’ve been stopped at airports man. but those cases are far and between. asians seriously get confused for any other random asian more frequently, was the point i was trying to make.
but when it comes to names? please. my name is the most bangin name in the building. holler back.
shlok actually is a hot name 🙂
OK, I know this post could easily turn into a comment about how your name was mispronounced which is sort of besides the point but I think I win worst mutation ever: a kid used to call me Shitty Manure. It actually sorta sounds like my name.
I can laugh now.
But in seriousness, I am big person for not changing the pronounciation of my name, though its led to some atrocious sayings. One time someone asked me if my parents were “hippies or something.” And I feel its my appearance not my name thats tagged me at airports. But this post made me think…
nuff said
my name has caused me so much crap over the years. it’s not just my 14-letter last name being mispronounced in every way possible, and back in school whenever the teacher paused while taking attendance, immediately interjecting “yep, that’s me” before they could even begin to mangle it. i can’t count the times i’ve heard “what a crazy name!” and “it must have taken a long time to learn to spell that as a kid!” and even, once or twice, “you better get married soon [to get rid of that name]”.
yesterday when the self check-in at the airport wasn’t working for my flight, the airline clerk jokily suggested that maybe it was because my name is “too long!”, and i had to restrain myself from saying “no, it’s because your f-ing machines don’t work”.
the worst thing is every time someone makes a joke about it, they act as if it must be the first time i’d heard such a witty remark. sigh.
But seriously, can Aasif Mandvi ever do a segment without flubbing at least one line?
1) i make fun of south indian names. is that mean of me? 🙂 one tamil chem. professor of mine joked that anyone would could say his whole name would get an A.
2) speaking of jokes, star trek ii is my bane!
Haha! I actually loved that movie as a kid.
When I read the wikipedia entry for the Khan character, it said this:
Soooo, when their genetic engineering program finally yielded a “superman” he turned out to be Desi…
I have a friend who named her daughter Naina (but they spell it Nayana) and everyone including the mother, father and daughter herself calls her Nay-ana (pronounced like Dianna).
The girl is 1/4 desi.
10 amritav — exactly, exactly. and the hilarious part about my last name is that it is PHONETIC!! i have particularly enjoyed when people with the last name sajdak (sie-dak), raczkowsky (raz-cow-ski), and krijcowicz (krite-so-witz) have balked upon reading my name. a-holes.
churn churn
I hear the machine getting warmed up and ready to eat up Obama and spit him out in the primaries… when did news reports start using his middle name in such wonderfully subtle ways? “There’s a lot to Barack HUSSEIN Obama that you don’t know! Like, did you know that Barack HUSSEIN Obama’s middle name is… HUSSEIN!? That’s right! Where’s he been hiding it this whole time? Hillary Rodham Clinton’s always been Hillary Rodham Clinton to you, Blue America!”
Uff yaar, so harrowing.
Brilliant, brilliant — you can mix up countries and regimes at will, but you can be absolutely certain that there are bad guys out there.
Mis- on non-pronunciation is a bore, but what about the pedants who insist on using the full arsenal of aspirations, glottal stops and guttural noises in order to ensure that one’s name is uttered in an ancestrally correct manner?
My name is Rebecca and I grew up in Chennai and it’s just as bad having an “english” name in India. Ruby, Roobeka are all common maglings. My fav though is Ribbon!
Welcome Naina.
Well, it wasn’t just CNN that made the Obama-Osama “mistake.”
Yahoo news did the same thing. Pure smear.
It’s an unbelievably disgusting tactic, but what’s new in American politics? Yes, I do think people will be subliminally swayed by it–especially since there still such rigid idea out there about what it is to be “American,” and since people tend to vote for whomever feels “safe” to them as president. Note the emphasis, for instance, on who “looks presidential” and who doesn’t. That’s code for “old or middle-aged white man without a foreign sounding name.” This can trump intelligence, ethics or ability.
The thing about this particular switch is that it’s pretty deniable, and by that time the damage is done. Ugly all around.
My name has thankfully not been butchered as badly as some of my South Indian friends. But I’ve always had to offer an explanation after spelling my name. In India, most people simply assumed I am Bengali (also because me last name is Das) though I would probably have done the same if I were in their shoes. In the US, since “ou” is pronounced as “oo”, people end up calling me Soorav and I don’t really bother correcting them unless I meet them often. A lot of people also call me my last name for it’s obvious simplicity.
I also feel there is an element of race involved in this. I’ve seen people look at Indians as if they are at fault for having a long name. Yet, they happily accept equally confusing Eastern European names (how about Chmielewski?).
Huh, this reeks of ignorance since the Shah was quite pro-US and was ousted for the same reason. Too bad people choose to be as ignorant.
Thankfully Europe has a huge diversity of names, and even the same names have different pronunciations or even spellings in different countries (John, Jean, Johann/Johannes/Jan, Giovanni, Juan) and often there are country-specific names. In addition, the average European isn’t as self-centred, ignorant and insensitive as the average American. So they often put up a brave face while pronouncing my name and you can almost see the smile of unstated gratitude and relief when I shorten it down for them. A German guy once told me that one of his Indian colleagues in America was called Battery-Charger intead of Bhattacharjee and he wouldn’t imagine doing that in Germany.
Welcome Naina.
I have a long last name that is pronounced exactly the way it is written. I was once going to spell it out for someone and as a preamble began by saying “It’s long. Let me… (spell it out for you)” but before I could finish my sentence, she had “L-o-n-g” written down 🙁
Great post, Naina. It’s so hard to even think of baby names when you want to find a mix between cultural/religious and easy to pronounce. My dad gave my sister and I both fairly non-Indian names because of this issue, but I’d rather not do that with my own.
Oh god, that’s terrible! But thank goodness it didn’t happen at Ellis Island… “Right, Long. Next!”
Sonia ji, please don’t say you’re going to go with a prefix suffix mashup Punjabi special like Gaganbinderpal. Please! Or Lovepreet. I’ve met a guy named Lovepreet. That’s murder.
I say this as I’m really curious as to the names 2nd generations Indians, specifically Sikhs, are going to give their children.
The Dutchies butcher my name a lot. The most common mispronounciation ties in with the different pronounciation of the ‘EE’ letter combination – in Dutch, it is pronounced as ‘AY’. So, ‘Meena’ becomes ‘Mayna’ and ‘Meenakshi’ is impossible for most Dutch, considering the ‘kshi’ doesn’t exist at all in Dutch. I’ve never had insulting comments about my name, ever. Which is why this post suprises me so. Most folks guess my origins correctly as well.
This is one of the benefits of living in India. Not that I do, but whenever I go back its nice getting compliments on your name and stuff instead of people constantly butchering it….
My parents decided to cleave the family’s last name in half after becoming citizens as we had a typical southie hindu name that was 5 syllables in length. Though the act has no doubt made my life easier in some ways, in other ways I kinda regret that they did it. I feel like we’ve sold a bit of our heritage to The Man and have rewarded him for being a lingual idiot.
A personal anecdote: My boss got a phone call in Dec 2001, about an ex-worker of his, a Tunisian Arab who’s taken flight lessons. After assuring the FBI that his Arab was one of the “good ones” He went on about it’s great they’re “putting the nose to the grindstone” with this stuff. The irony of the situation, my boss had the last name Nichols and was from Michigan.
ashit chakravorty…dude! I can imagine the shit you went thru growin up
.
There are many pretty names without the regular ‘meet’, ‘jeet’, ‘deep’, and recently ‘leen’…. Bani, Simran, Saakhi, Harman, Jasmine
Whats wrong with a Loveleen anyway?
I used to help people pronounce my name be saying,”Sri, as in rhymes with “tree”, and Ram, as in CD.” This led to the unfortunate and much protested nickname of CD-Rom. Sigh.
A related issue is that some of us Southies didn’t really have last names or family names before our parents migrated to the States or elsewhere. My “last” name is actually my father’s first name. And my poor dad has to respond to a version of his father’s name, which he can’t stand.
Looking over a list at work recently, I found a fellow named “Sri Srinivasan” somewhere out there in the world. Wonder how that came about.
hear the machine getting warmed up and ready to eat up Obama and spit him out in the primaries…
Psshaw. Does anyone think Barack (or even Hillary) stands a chance? We will get a white “born again” or some other type of literalist Christian male. That is what the people want, whatever the party affiliation, and – there can be little variation on the archetype.
And the funniest i have observed is Rakhi understood as Rocky.
I’ve never had insulting comments about my name, ever. Which is why this post suprises me so – Meena in comment # 26
You know what here in rural Tennessee – the White people go out of their way to correctly pronounce my five syllable Indian name and are always curious what it means. I have Indian friends in other American cities and towns who share the same experience. But the comments on this site don’t surprise me. This is one of the distinguishing features of this site – sticking it to the MAN! Fictitious accounts of White racism are invented while passing off minority ( Black/Indian/anti semitic ) racism as ignorance.
I don’t know if second-gen Anglicizing will actually stop it though. It’s as though the brown skin primes people for expecting something more exotic. My parents went out of their way to Anglicize our names — I mean my name’s “Neal” and it’s closer to a traditional “Indian” name than my sisters’ names are. And yet people still manage to screw up our names. I get “Nee – awl” a lot. Also, if someone asks “What’s your name?” and I say “It’s Neal”, about 50% of the time they think my name is “Itsneal”. Like, what?!
Then the popularity of Le Pen, Haider etc and the riots in Paris must all be anomalies…
Names can be such a sensitive issue and I understand how you feel. My brotherÂ’s name is Amal so he gets the same shyt too.
This is something that bothers me about the name thing. Yeah people will butcher difficult foreign names but I wish more of us took the time to correct them and force someone to say their name correctly rather than simply change it to something more Western. In the past 5 years my desi friends have had children named Ethan, Dylan, Megan, Ryan, Jason & Katie. Maybe itÂ’s the fob in me but damn that killed me. Some of these people werenÂ’t even born here and migrated here as teenagers so it really really bothers me that they chose to sell out in a way and name their kid something so generic and disregard Indian names.
IÂ’ve seen people struggle and make an effort to pronounce names correctly. For me it ends up becoming a fight on principles. If I have to change my name for you whatÂ’ll it be next? I have to eat beef to be more American? Come on.
hehe, I promise no Inder’s or Jeet’s or Preet’s! I also promise no Pinky’s or Sunny’s =) Oh, and definitely not Simran or Jasmine either because those have become the standard of “I want to give my kid a Sikh name but I want it to be easy to pronounce” – if it has appeared in a Hindi movie, it won’t be my kid’s name =)
Well it kind of depends. My parents put a lot of thought into our names, and tried to find ones that at least had some classic Indian connotation. It was not just “selling out” or taking an easy route.
But also, there’s a twenty five year lag in my case. America has changed a lot in its attitude towards acculturation and non-WASP cultures in recent decades. So while I’d feel very comfortable naming my future kids more traditional Indian names, I don’t blame my parents for choosing the names they did when looking at the country in the 1980s.
Isn’t that a different matter altogether? I thought we were talking about the frog knowing that there is a world outside the well, that might be different from life within the well.
But yeah, I certainly agree that there has been an upsurge of the right and of intolerance in this part of the world.
Neal is an Indian name so thats not what I’m talking about. My parents did the same thing, named us easy names. I respect that but that’s still Indian. The sellout factor for me is with the totally angaliced names and middle names. I don’t get that at all.
But also, there’s a twenty five year lag in my case. America has changed a lot in its attitude towards acculturation and non-WASP cultures in recent decades. So while I’d feel very comfortable naming my future kids more traditional Indian names, I don’t blame my parents for choosing the names they did when looking at the country in the 1980s.
We picked a very traditional, three-syllable Hindu name for my kiddo. It remains to be seen whether she cusses us out for the inconvenience it will undoubetdly cause her later on in life.
But yeah, I certainly agree that there has been an upsurge of the right and of intolerance in this part of the world.
I expect much the same here in the coming decades, as the “anglo” population declines from 69% to <50%. Increasing insecurity – to be seen everywhere on the net, which is not bound by the rules of political correctness, even violence- as is already prefigured somewhat in American music and art, and a continuation of the grand “pacification” strategy – very high levels of imprisonment of the minorities.
JoAT: interesting that you think taking an anglo name is selling out…
i’m a big fan of romanizing names. it’s not that i dislike or am not proud of my asian heritage, but i feel that anglicizing my name reflects the fact that i’m asian-american — of asian origin, but pretty much american in my attitudes, beliefs etc. in fact, the only thing ethnic about me besides my looks are the fact that i like to eat stinky food and sometimes forget my english when i’m really really tired). Most korean last names cannot/are not anglicized properly or pronounced easily. How many Lee’s and Kim’s do you know? In korean, Lee is actually pronounced “EE” (no L), and Kim is actually pronounced “Gim”. i don’t think there is anything wrong with anglicizing for convenience.
i am happy with the ‘americanized’ pronounciation of my name, because i think it reflects how mixed i am. taking the korean origin and essence but putting an american spin on the pronounciation is fine with me. that’s sort of how i live my life. even if i visit the homeland, i don’t really fit in there — i get pegged as american within 30 seconds of getting off the plane just by the way i walk and dress.
True, but my sisters are Lori and Jill. As I said, they get progressively more and more Anglicized.
But there were reasons for that. My parents routinely have their (VERY easy to pronounce) Indian names butchered all the time, and they knew that we’d suffer on that end. So they made this decision. I don’t think it was an easy choice or a “sell out” though. It was a response to the biases of their adopted culture during a time when that culture seemed unlikely to change. These days, I think it IS more likely to change though.
Since I was born in Canada and named my daughter Angela, I guess that makes me race-traitor to some on this board.
I need to clarify that the sellout isn’t some level of put down of my friends. More that they themselves said they didn’t want their kids to go thru the problems they went thru at school because of their names and though I respect it and understand it’s the sellout factor for me. I rather force people around me to learn about me than conform to their convenience.
The name goes, the language goes, so many of my friends don’t even eat Indian food anymore, don’t take their kids to India etc so a big part of me feels like there is love lost for something that makes you so unique in the need to fit in with everyone else. I understand our parents had it rough when they first came here but so many of my parents old friends they’ve known for 20+ years say their names acurately.
I guess for me it’s a lot of introspection on what I’m willing to give up to be part of something larger and I suppose I’m in a time in America where I don’t feel like I have to give up anything.
My legal first name is Vishwanath, but I go by Vishy nearly all of the time.
When I tell people my name, I get well-meaning questions from non-desi Americans like ‘Is that short for Vishnu?’ Other Americans subconsciously make this association anyway and call me Vishny, which is sad. Indians or Indian Americans, on the other hand, frequently think my name is Rishi, and I’ve to make sure they get that my name is actually Vishy.
When I introduce myself, I occasionally defuse the ‘ooh-he’s-got-a-weird-name’ situation by saying “yes, as in the capital of Nazi France.” That breaks the ice somewhat. I try not to use it too often though, lest I too be mistaken as a Holocaust Denier. 😉
If 2 desi apply for a job, and they equal in every way, but one name is Angela Dhillon[like my daughter] and the other name is some long desi name.
The simple thing as having western sounding name could be thing that helps my daughter in the future.
When I was in high school, I became friends with Ellen, who sat in front of me. I asked her how she said her last name.
“If you’re going to be friends with me, you should know how to spell it and pronounce it — Shklyarevsky.”
20 yrs later, I still can. However, she always wanted to change her name to Ellen Sky.
Anyway, desi angst about names is not new. This is a country of immigrants with a governor named Schwartzneggar. People will learn to deal with it. BTW, Barack Obama said people told him ‘you can have 1 funny name, not 2 funny names” People can deal with an Oprah because of the Winfrey.
I get irritated by someone named Suchitra and her best friends call her Susan — not even just Su or Suchie.. they call her a whole different name. I have an issue with that.
I’ve had my name butchered in school and work, and even Indian people say it incorrectly the first time. But I got to a point where I embraced it because it’s mine.