What's in a name?

I recently discovered that I suffer from Name-dyslexia. This disease, discovered by me, leads to mixing up names. This essentially means that I may not forget people's names but mix them up or change them involuntarily. Recently I addressed Gayathri as Kavitha and Srivatsan as Srinivasan. Going back, when the Iraq prison abuse story broke out, for sometime I was reading Abu Ghraib as Abu Gharib. And pitifully thinking that it must be a poverty-stricken area to get such a name.

I realise that people get offended when I address them differently. In the list of most provocative actions, calling people by a wrong name should feature among top five. A colleague of mine started calling me 'steedhar'. I confronted him eventhough I knew that semi-literates pronounce my name that way and hence he was actually making fun. He reminded me the background funnily, and I gleefully withdrew. The point is, I wasn't happy initially and probably, a bit scared that others will pick up that accent to ruin my name forever. Such was the fear of holiding onto one's name. My friend Ganesh had his name tampered into 'ganesoo' by his wife. He wanted that to stop desperately but she persisted until I found a solution. I gave him an idea to tamper her name 'Shalini' into 'solnyee'. This I borrowed from a Kamal's movie where he is a slum-dweller and calls his girlfriend that way. Now they have come to a compromise and started calling each other properly.

Perhaps this name-fantism applies to everything. My friend Swati and other fellow bengalis still want to address their capital as 'Calcutta'. And Outlook wrote vehemently about Shiv Sena's drive to change any and every landmark of Maharashtra into 'desi' names. Though Chennaites grudgingly resigned to the loss of 'Madras', they are still adament about calling 'Anna Road' as 'Mount Road'.

Perhaps a rose in any name doesn't smell as sweet.