What's in a name?

So, I've been planning this post for a long long time now. But this post totally formed words in my head and here I am writing at 2.30 AM with an apple in my hand (I'm dieting ) Like many of you know, I'm a Tamilian brought up in a fairly pan-Indian household (Okay, let's exclude my granny, my mom when I turned 15 and my dad quite a few times!) Yes, I was and I'm the only one with the pan-Indian sensibilities. My mom was brought up in Orissa, loosely and proudly termed (by my maternal family) as North India. My mom was a 70's child. Bell-bottoms, long hair left open, all the tight salwars - you name it and she did it. My mom and her siblings were used to being ridiculed on some occasions for being South Indians. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. So, my mom and her siblings made fun of people like you and me and the kind of people that my mom and her siblings are, right now. You can imagine how we grew up :P We did not watch Tamil movies simply coz no one watched them or understood them as well. We loved North Indian food. Dal- Chawal was super cool while Paruppu saadam was frowned upon. We mocked at dappankoothu songs and laughed in public about Rajnikanth. Called Kamal Hassan an Indian actor, played Antakshari with only Hindi movie songs, laughed at Jitendra's Hindi movies and pointed out Hema Malini's accent. However, we loved our thair saadam! Yes, we were hypocrites.

Soon, I turned 22, wiser and certainly a little more prouder than what I was, of being a South Indian, but making sure, at the same time that my Hindi was unaccented and thanked all the Gods - Ram, Shiv and Krishna and my parents that my name wasn't Jayalakshmi, but in fact was/is Nandini. (that is a different story, apart from the fact that Karnataka State's milk was called Nandini milk. Sigh) At 22, my granny decided to turn from the sweet, loving, story-telling, lots of food-giving (to male cousins, and less to girls) to a pestering, conspiring, orthodox Pati who wanted to see the eldest daughter of her only son get married. My mom had become internet-savvy and my dad was becoming increasingly South Indian!

After a year of protest with various excuses of not being ready, I decided to throw a spanner in the works. Trust me, I planned this after a year of observing certain trends at TamilMatrimony.com. I noticed that the community I belonged to had boys with names like Subramaniam, Gopalakrishnan, Hariharamahadevan, Shivasubramanian...and so on. Yes, please add Panchapakesan too. While I do not have my husband's very smart name/surname after my first name even now, I certainly wasn't going to marry any of these guys. While I carefully announced this to my very horoscope-driven family, their first question was if I'd fallen in love with someone from our sister community. All because I complained that grooms from our sister community had ethnic sounding, but nice names - some old-fashioned but with that charm. And they were more handsome (safe word this.). After several arguments, I managed to convince them that I wasn't in love with anyone and I was probably never going to be. Possibly. So, this argument dragged on. My mom'd point out guy after guy and talk of how handsome he was or how our horoscopes matched 100% or how he did not have a mother and no siblings, or was the only kid in the house or of course, how he'd been at IIT- Madras. I found something or the other to push her off. Including marking all her emails as read :P

Finally, one fine day, in one of my placatory moods, I decided to check TamilMatrimony.com and found AB on it. He wasn't from IIT- Madras and was not a S/W engineer. I thought this was good news here and moved on to read that he was brought up in the North! This certainly got me excited and I boldly asked my mom to go ahead. Soon, we had to meet and when I spoke to him, he spoke Tamil fluently and scared the living daylights out of me. I felt I was listening to Sun TV. I kept smiling and nodding my head when I spoke to him. Rather, listened to him. Strangely enough, I'm the talkative one and he is the introvert, silent one! After he left, I told my mom that if nothing else, our relationship'd suffer from severe communication issues. But then everything else worked out and since I spoke to him casually in Hindi (to test his accent :P) and then casually asked him about Hindi movies and was very satisfied that his knowledge was better than mine and his Hindi was extremely good, I decided to go ahead.

But then, sometimes, your life's efforts just go in vain and you just need to accept reality. Who'd have thought otherwise that I have a full-blown blog friendship with every second graduate student in the US who hails from Chennai? Or who'd have thought I try to translate Tamil songs now to understand them better. The translator is, of course, the man who I fight with everyday not to cook morkozhambu or kootu or not understanding a single word in his conversations sometimes, or being the butt of his Tamil jokes against me or to listen ONLY to dappankoothu songs in the car. Sigh. You think all this is not serious eh?

He intends to name my kid if she is a girl : Abithakuchalambal. No, I couldn't bear to hear the kid's name if he turned out to be a boy. I shall cross the bridge when I reach it.