When we
wanted to name our son, we did a Cntrl C Cntrl V (Cut-Paste) from our names and made up a name and thought
that we had come out with a brilliant idea. The Cut-Paste worked well for us to get to
a name that was (a) very simple, (b) easy to spell, with just five
alphabets. No surname just the name. By the way we did get his passport also with just his name!
SUnilnaMITa
It is another thing that it was not very visible that our names was hidden in our son's name so we had to tell people we knew specifically how we had named our son. While some said we were lazy, some others took a cue and tried to name their new born the same way. So there were some compliments and there were some jeer. When we told our son about the way he was named, he insisted that he was not sure he liked his name!
However as far as I was concerned. I was under this illusion that we had done a great job by thinking of a CntrlC-CntrlV name.
This was some twelve years ago.
My tweleve year old son came to me the other day and asked me,
“Can I please have a personal email account?”
He insisted that
it be a gmail account, not very sure why though.
After a while I figured out
that it was not possible to get an email account which just had his
“name”. Probably it was taken. While I tried several options and thought that “name.eman”
which incidentally was available; was a fantastic idea. But as should be, he was not keen on a 2 times cut-paste name. Finally he chose “name.school_name” as his email. You see he
loves his school!
Set me thinking will there be a planned name in which parents will choose their kids name? I my sincere guess is yes. What will the choise depend on? May be the availability of an email address?
Couple of years ago, the name
of a child, especially in India, was constrained by several beliefs. A name definitely had to have the
- family surname,
- the family deity name could not be left out and displease the gods;
- well known ancestor's (grandparents) name was deemed good to have,
- village name so that people knew where you came from,
- profession and
- what not
after making space for all these, one included the -real- name by which the kid would be called.
This method of appeasing all meant the names got pretty long and in a way unique. The upside of this in the age of internet was that it allowed
one to obtain a login of your choice on any e-commerce site that you
wanted to including an email account!
However over a period of time the general trend was
to shorten ones name. People questioned, why should I carry my profession in my name? Why should I have a deity’s name in a name etc. This ended up making the names shorter which in turn makes it less unique.This was alright before the internet, email, e-commerce were popular. But now with turn in increased e-commerce activity, one needs a unique name to transact. Else you will need to choose a name with numerals which does not look all that representative of a person!
This set me thinking, will
parents now work on a different set of constraints to name their
children? Will naming of children be a -new parents- dilemma? Short or long name?
- Will it be based on some uniqueness metric?
- Will it be based on ones ability to get a decent name space in the digital space (so that one can get a gmail, a facebook account or a twitter handle)[*]?
- Will names be auctioned? The ones that can get you a nice email address would cost more?
[*] assuming that people want
to use their real names even in their virtual world.
Or will all of us be reduced to a set of numbers? Like your employee number, your bank account number, your UID/SSN? May be a universal identification number. The first two digits to signify the nation, the next two to .... and the last x digits represent you.
Atleast kids will not crib that I do not like my name! Or will they say, Wow. My number is a prime?
Comments