The Name

What’s in the name? I cannot disagree more. For all the idealism this question carries with it, it decimates the importance of the echo which a name generates. A name invariably invokes memories in us because of the namesakes we know. There is so much associated with a name. The teacher you dread most, the girl you loved, the actor you like, the place you visited, the colony you lived in, the roommate you had and it would go on forever. Suddenly you realize that the life is about getting associated with names and remembering them later on with fondness, with dread, with pure hatred and with every emotions which our age can conjure at that time.

We form our thinking, our rules through different stages in life and we keep amending them. And hence the people we meet during different walks of life attach a behavioral tag to our name. The surprise when someone meets us after long time and the remark you have changed is just an indication of the image our name invoked in that particular person. The image may be of physical appearance or it may be of certain peculiarities.

They say the name sticks. The cruelty associated with a murderer, the dread associated with a murderer is nothing but the nature attached to their names. And so a change in name and the place may mark a rebirth of the person. No one is bad, each one of us suffer from bad assumptions. The assumptions are associated with the name. And hence the name of a dumb child (though I personally feel that no child is dumb), a prisoner, a murderer comes with those assumptions attached with it. Seldom, as a society have we given them a chance and rarely do they get an opportunity to forsake the name. And so the struggle of Gogol Ganguly in The Namesake seems justified.

What’s in the name? Oh, there is a lot. A lot.