What is there in a Name?

All my siblings were assigned names based on religious texts. While my younger brother and I were crafted out of indigenous Mahabharata, my sister, the eldest sibling, was named after a female deity who personified the city of Rome.

I never felt comfortable with my name. It sounded complicated and difficult to articulate. I eventually ascertained that it was my maternal grandfather, obviating the existing recourse to nominative determinism or horoscope or astrology, decided our formal first names. He was an avid literature buff, with an uncanny knack of assigning names to the multitude of his grandchildren based on the epic he was engrossed in, at any given time, as his only repertoire.

A rose, even if it were called something else, would smell just as sweet. But, then, roses unlike us are not susceptible to cognitive dissonance! My quandary with my name surfaced in right earnest while at school in Gwalior; my teachers as well as my friends could never pronounce it, and I was intermittently referred either as Arvind M or Arvindam, depending on the pronouncer’s background, Sanskrit teacher being the only exception.

During my adolescence, I lost out on attention from girls, purely because of the byzantine twists involved in my name. I wish I was Arjun, Ram or Ravi. But then, my grandfather`s need for uniqueness would not have been assuaged. As a course correction, I named my only son Aditya and to the credit of my foresight, he fell in love with a girl in a jiffy and got married on 8 Dec 23 .

Isn`t it important with what name an individual wishes to be called be decided by him or her, or does our discomfort with our names indicate low self- esteem, or is it simply an exercise of self- determinism vs semantic determinism? The fact that our names have been bestowed by someone external to the “SELF” is an initial cognitive-realization and then to be internalised, as the subsequent cognitive realization, forces an implication- load on its acceptability.