"What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;"

William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

I’m sure that Juliet’s rose didn’t have to deal with government documents and social media services. ¹

I want to say that I’ve been thinking a lot about names lately, but the truth is that it’s been on my mind for years. Ever since some overzealous government official decided that I had to have a middle name on my passport, ignoring the fact that my birth certificate doesn’t have one. How much grief has that caused me? And why is it so easy for someone to fuck up my name like that, but so difficult for me to correct that fuckup? I think back to when I went to boarding school and the sign painter spelled my name wrong on my trunk. It led to a nickname that hurt me, but also has stuck with me since the first week of boarding school, and is an indelible part of my identity now.²

My wife also suffers from this. Her name is spelled differently depending on where in the country she is. Karnataka decided to split her last name because everyone must have an initial at the end of their name and no one (more likely, the software designers) could imagine that a name could be different. Her community doesn’t really do last names though. Your last name is just your father’s name appended to your name. Your official name, that is. There’s a religious name too. ³

I’ve been thinking a lot about names and their power lately. A lot of this has been related to the CAA-NRC “debate” that went on last year. I use quotes because it doesn’t really feel like a debate. The government is insisting that there is nothing untoward in their bill that specifically excludes members of a particular religion, while the protestors largely disagree. There isn’t much in the way of criticism from the 4th estate, because no one wants to lose access to the government.

But let’s think about names, shall we? A Muslim friend of ours has a situation where his father’s name is spelled one way on his father’s documents, and another on his. His own name is spelled differently depending on whether it was written directly in English, or transliterated from Marathi. For a simple example of this difference, Krishnan is spelled Krushnan when written in Marathi. Now, this might not be a big deal within Maharashtra. Now imagine that you go somewhere else, somewhere where they don’t understand that this variance in your name is within tolerances. What then?

Imagine, if you will, that someone is looking to disenfranchise you. Maybe not actively. Maybe they’re being told that it’s important to the security of the country. Maybe they’re just following orders. Or maybe they just don’t want to rock the boat and provide for their family. Upton Sinclair once said, “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”⁴⁵

I’ve been thinking off and on about this topic since reading patio11’s essay on names. Go read it and think about anything else that you might take for granted about that how the world works.