What's in a name ?

What's in a name ? "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" - William Shakespeare wrote in Romeo and Juliet. 

Shakespeare was so ahead of time when he mentioned it in the 16th century. The personality of a person is entirely personal, with his or her name hardly playing any role in it. I know an untruthful guy named SATYABRATA who came out as a congenial liar to the core, an ordinary looking girl named "TRIPURA SUNDARI (Universal Beauty)". A Beggar was named as KUBERA (the Hindu God of wealth), a man dying at an early age bore the name JEEVAK (Long life). A person with the name SUBUDHI (Good thoughts) should have ideally be named DURBUDHI (Bad thoughts) - his name proved to be a misnomer as his mind was filled with filth.

Back home in India, we grew up in a collective society where our identity is often qualified by our lineage, village, caste, community etc etc. Most South Indians and many Punjabis have their village names tagged to their names. For example, for a P. Ravi Kumar, P could be the first initial of his native village. A Sikh Jagjit Singh TALWANDI, the last part being the name of his PIND, or village. We as an individual entity akways come last. 

Most South Indian Hindus from my generation have at least a God or Goddess's name embedded in their own. There is hardly a name without Ram, Laksman, Lakshmi, Parvati, Krishna, Gopal, Shiva, Srinivas, Ganesh, Karthik, Murugappan or a combination of some of these. 

One such combo name is Laxman Shiva Ramkrishnan. During one monsoon, no sooner my flight took off from Calcutta than violent air turbulence engulfed it. While remembering God instantly came the name of the cricketer "Laxman Shiva Ramkrishnan" to my mind. The nervous passenger in me started chanting his name which comes with all premier Gods name in a Combo package. Before I could finish uttering my chant 108 times, the flight was preparing for its descent at Bhubaneswar Airport. 

In olden days, half of the kids used to die before they reached the age of 5 in an age when there was no vaccination to kill harmful micro bugs before they kill you. If one of these diseases Tetanus, Polio, Whooping Couph, Diptheria, Malaria, Flue won't get you, the dreaded Cholera or Small Pox would.

In Odisha it was superstitiously believed that Lord Yama, the Hindu God of death ignores the kids with mundane names as he prefers to take children with catchy, fancy, attractive names. So parents used to give avoidable names as AINTHA (Miss Messy Food-Leftover), GOBARAA (Mr. Cow Dung), BALUNGA (Mr. Weed), POCHARA (Mr. Dirty Rotten) and so on. Not sure if Lord Yama obliged.

Time flew and many Odias developed wings to fly to faraway lands as Europe, Australia and of course the farthest and most attractive destination for immigration - The United States of America. But they never imagined their names would go through distortion which Lord Yama would yet again love to ignore.

Here is a list of such names along with their American / Anglicized ones which the westerners find hard to pronounce. 

Pitambara - Pitt
Nityananda - Nit
HarishChandra - Harry
Dhananjay - Dan
Dinabandhu - Dean
Krupasindhu - Krip
Narayana - Nora
Nabaghana - Nab
Nilamadhab - Neel
Pradipta Kumar - PK
Satyajit - Satty
Debasis - Dave
Krishnamurthy - Krish
Radhakrushna - Reed
Jagannath - Jaggs
Nikunja - Nick
Markandeswar - Mark
Bichitrananda Patnaik- Goes by a shortened form of his last name as Pat, thankfully not by a truncated version of his first name.
Dambarudhara Patra - Similar situation here Prefers to be called Pat, not Damb.

So, what's in a name ?