The importance of being Suresh13
As a nation of Software engineers and a generation of Barista sipping BPO baby boomers transition from chilled beer to child bearing , these anxious about-to-be parents are leaving no stone unturned in their quest for that perfect name for their baby - one that is exotic sounding - preferably quasi-mythological and that is still pronounceable in a call center setting, and, one that ensures a unique mail id on yahoo or gmail without appending a large prime number at the end to distinguish it from others, and in their mad search through musty old Amar Chitra kathas and hasty subscriptions to www.cool-desi-babynames.org and www.watchamacallit.com, there is a forgotten casualty that has fallen silently by the wayside, a roadkill deserving of a proper eulogy, before we permanently lay it to rest.
I am referring to the humble ‘Suresh’, or for that matter Ramesh (and to a lesser extent the Ganesh) - names ubiquitous enough a decade ago, now rarely ever considered, or if considered, usually as a prank or as an ill-conceived revenge. As an experiment, look around you. How many young couples do you see deciding between Anya,Ananya,Anikya, Anikanya,Adi,Maya, and suchlike, or for the more adventurous -Kapilavastu, Soorpanaka, Ghatotkacha, and what not have you, ..and look at just how many are named Suresh. None? I thought so.
But this was not always the case. Couples in the 70s evidently thought Suresh or Ramesh was a cool name- we all know quite a few Suresh’s of our generation who are perfectly normal. As in most things in India- the movies played a big part in the naming of babies (unless you were on Kerala, where babies were named after the leader of the communist fad of the day). The Suresh of 70s movies was a ‘nice’ character, a friend of the hero (who was usually Vijay, or Rahul, or if you were tamilian-Alex Pandian- though this name never caught on, for some reason, I wonder why), and in some cases he dies, virtuously. Our conservative parents, in an uncertain, un-ambitious time, never aimed for their children to be heroes, they just wanted their kids to be nice, have nice friends, and be harmless, mostly.
On the other hand, the parents of today’s globalizing, attention grabbing India want their kids to be superstars, Hrithik-sized over-achievers, with names that retain their Indian-ness, that are both eclectic and enunciabile, given this, who can blame our Sureshs’ for being hopelessly outclassed?
But how long can this go on? What happens when these unscrupulous parents exhaust the Mahabharatha, the Ramayana, and the Upanishads. At some point, our exploding population is going to swamp the names in the Hindu Pantheon, and what happens then? Do we reach into the Jataka Tales? No my friends, let this madness stop right here, before we start endlessly exhuming and recycling fringe characters from obscure epics. Imagine having a class with three Jarasandhas- (who would almost defintely go by the nicknames of JP, Mota Jarasandha, and The Other One), as if children didn’t have a tough enough time sorting out the multiple Srirams and the Karthiks at school. Also think of the incongruity of having an exotic first name before a pedestrian last one( though a Natasha Balasubramaniam is probably not as lame as a Vichitraveera Patel), utter confusion. Enough! Will someone please think of the children?
I suggest a back to the basics approach, like the one adopted by the good folks at IIT Kanpur, but with a twist. Let everyone have the same first name, and let the last name be whatever they would have had before -their father’s name/village/caste/tribe etc, saving this trigger happy me2-wannabe generation many thankless hours of mythological excavation. The gods are with me on this one, trust me. Of course, the first name, would have to be, Suresh.
