From: mvij@ocf.berkeley.edu (Pendragon)
Newsgroups: alt.culture.us.asian-indian
Subject: Re: Asian indian names
Date: 28 Aug 1992 20:58:51 GMT
Organization: U.C. Berkeley Open Computing Facility
NNTP-Posting-Host: tempest.berkeley.edu

In article <bjag-280892143525@owl.ls.nwu.edu> bjag@nwu.edu (Bharathi Jagadeesh) writes:
>
>Americans don't do a great job of pronouncing some Indian names, but there
>are some Indian names that are fairly easy for Americans to pronounce and I
>think there's been a trend to naming American born Indian-american children
>names like that instead of the harder to pronounce ones. 

For some reason, people find pronouncing my brother's name (Rajnish) much
more difficult than my name (Manish).  I don't understand how difficult
it is to pronounce the 'jn' part.  So he became Raj or Razzberry or whatever
cruelty they could inflict.  (Junior high school.)

My parents did not think too hard when they named my youngest brother
Ashish.  For obvious reasons.  Yet I can't bring myself to advise him to
call himself such a white yuppified blow-dried power-monger unisex corporate
name as Ashley or Ash.


>I personally like the fact that I have an Indian first name and am glad
>that my parents didn't change it in order to submit to western mores. I
>also plan to give my children Indian names (definitely for the girls,
>though I'm stilling waiting for input for the boys). I think it's fairly
>easy for a girl to have an unusual name, especially if it's chosen to sound
>nice. 
>Bharathi Jagadeesh                 bjag@nwu.edu

The names have it.  The names are the link to the past.  The names stay with
you, no matter if you try to escape completely from your culture or change
your given name from something Hungarian or Romanian to Cary Grant or
Fred Astaire.  You at least will always know what was given to you at
birth.

Indian names should be kept unless one decides one wishes complete assi-
milation.  You can choose easier Indian names, more pleasant Indian names,
ones which resonate better in this adopted language than the lengthy
religious ones (which had much significance back home) do.  Yet to change
the Indian names and grant something ambiguous, like Joyce / Joycie or
Angela/Anjali, is to allow, almost encourage, the children to pass more
freely in to the host culture and entirely lose any link to the past.

I am talking here only of given names; I am not against using nicknames
in business or in casual life.  Jay translates more freely than Jagdish
in the corporate world; Manish is a pain to spell out and so when giving
a name for a slice of pizza I sometimes call myself Manny.  But there is
some value in keeping the unique, the different, and the INDIAN name, and
in educating others about the variety of such names and what they mean.
It would be a dull world indeed if all we had were Toms, Dicks and Harrys.
(no women, for one thing ;-) )

Ok, so labels don't matter?  They DO.  They are representations, they are
full of meaning.  Names matter.  Suppose "flowers" were called "snots".
Not nearly as nice, is it?  It's the physical sn sneer sound, not just the
meaning associated with "snot."  Aside from sound, names have meaning.
Petrovich, Avelicheva; Venkatraman, Narayanaswami, Africawalla; Johnson,
Cooper, Stevens.  Yes, these are last names, patronymics; but first names
also commonly have meanings in some cultures.

Ok, I'm late for class . . . but flame me, PLEASE.  I fight fire with fire.

}:>

Manish
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Newsgroups: alt.culture.us.asian-indian