What’s in a name? Oh, Plenty! I was born in a liberal Muslim family in 1950. There was nothing liberal about my name, though. Every one of the three elements was resoundingly Islamic. The mixed neighbourhood in which I grew up never found the name worthy of any notice. But some children at my school did. They found its association with a religious community a good source of entertainment – at my expense. Digs on beards, lungis, skull-caps, beef-eating and – the perennial favourite – circumcision. It never descended to fisticuffs, or even a decent sized brawl; probably I was too timid, probably I needed their friendship. So, no serious damage done. The evening of high-energy rompings in my lane with friends helped flush out whatever trace of inadequacies I might have carried home. It has to be recorded here that this peculiar variety of “innocent” ragging decreased as we moved into the higher classes, and disappeared altogether in college. Meanwhile, the world of my private thoughts and beliefs was also describing its own trajectory. The earliest feeling I can remember is a warm, unconscious acceptance of the benevolence of all super-natural beings across the religious board. This changed during my mid-teens to a sharp appreciation of the singularities of the faith I was born into. I got into occasional fastings and prayings and recitation of the Holy Book; the beatific glow on my face must have made a pretty sight. As I moved into my late teens, skepticism gathered strength. I was muddled, yes, afraid, yes; but I preferred confusion and fear to unsupported certainties. This was obviously the result of the company I kept and the books I read. Well before I got married at age 27, I was a full-blown, hard-core, unrelenting atheist; which also meant that I would marry someone who, at the very least, sympathized with my state of (un)belief. It thus happened that my daughter and son arrived to parents for whom any kind of unsupported belief was anathema. If they were to grow up as free-thinking persons, why, then, should they carry the mill-stone of being identified with a religion to which they bore no allegiance? Mill-stone it would certainly be – I had carried its weight around my own neck, albeit mildly. I had managed by deliberately projecting a secular persona. We had foreseen the demonization of the entire Muslim community because of the aggressive, intolerant fringe within and without, and we didn’t want our two kids to have to pay for a faith they wouldn’t even be buying. So we took care to choose religion-neutral names for them. We dredged out a suitably innocuous surname from our family archives, and rolled the kids out for easy assimilation in a rather name-obssessed society. The master plan was that they would marry outside the concern of religion, and free themselves and their progeny of affiliation with anything except good sense. They grew up with an indulgent irreverence for handed-down wisdom. The daughter, a 35 year old careerist now, does not want to marry only because society expects her to. She hasn’t met the right boy yet. The son, now 31, is happily married to a girl born in another un-faith. Before he met his girl, I had asked him whether he would marry a Muslim. “Why not?” he had replied. “All I would care for is compatibility!” His pat reply staggered me. It revealed to me my own insecurities (and the consequent warpings) that those “innocent” raggings had engendered. It occurred to me that as a first generation atheist I carried with me the passion of a neo-convert. My children often call me the Osama bin Laden of atheism. They are completely in consonance with the rational position, but they do not carry the same abhorrence for the faith their father does. They didn’t have to hack their way out of the smoky, suffocating, spooky, soul-destroying, yet strangely mesmeric space of gods and demons and prophets to break out into a world of human beings. A thought: could their neutral names have shielded them from the ravages to which I was subjected during early school? Our foresight had, it appears, helped them slip past the emotional vulnerabilities of childhood and adolescence. It could not insulate them altogether, though, from the morbid curiosity of a name-obsessed segment of society. Let me ignore chronology and recount the first event from Modi’s Gujarat, only because the subject lends itself to its most fashionable rendition there. My daughter has recently taken up a job in Ahmedabad. She had been alerted to the unbridgeable polarization that has taken place of the Hindus and Muslims since the 1985 riots, and later the Godhra riots in 2002. But it was only when broker after broker showed either unwillingness or helplessness to find for her a cosmopolitan area that the dimensions of the divide hit her. “Tamey Juhapura nu ghar dekho ne ben, ek dum A one chhey!” Or try Jangpura, or Shahi Bag, or any one of the ghettoes. Jodhpur? No. Vastrapur, Ambawadi, Bodakdeo, Satellite? Mushkil chhey, ben, mushkil chhey. The girl, however, was determined to beat the ban. She planted herself in a tacky guest house and lived out of a suitcase till she finally landed a decent flat in Prahlad Nagar owned by a Delhi Sikh. “Prahlad Nagar?” said the astounded Muslim auto-rickshaw man chatting me up from the railway station to my daughter’s flat. “What’s a girl from a good Muslim family doing there?” Question: Why didn’t my daughter hide behind her famous religion-neutral name? Answer: She couldn’t because some while earlier Prithviraj Chavan’s Mumbai had exposed its inadequacy to cover her culpability from end to end. Before signing the tenancy deal in Santacruz, she was required to go for police verification. That required identity proof. She flashed her passport which, alongside her sanitized name, carried her father’s name in all its triple-barreled glory. The landlord was livid. “Kai tumhi? Itkya mahattvachi gosht saangat naahi? (What did you mean by concealing such vitally important information?) We just don’t rent out our house to Muslims. The Society rules don’t allow it.” My son put this intelligence to good use when it was his turn to look for a flat in Mumbai. He did his house-hunting from behind his company-issued identity card. That didn’t carry his father’s name. When signing time arrived, he smartly let his wife do the honours. Her father’s name was too insipid to raise eye-brows or blood pressure. Further south, in Bengaluru, a few years ago, the story had been the same. The IT capital of the country, among the top ten preferred locations of the world, bristling with top educational institutions and bustling with its alumni, it had driven both my children up the wall with its “Saary, Amma, Saary, Saar, we can-not give our house to Muslims.” Let it also be proclaimed with pride and warmth that whether in Ahmedabad, Mumbai or Bengaluru (or Pune still earlier), my daughter and son have always managed to find gracious land-lords/ladies, all of them Hindus. For them the name has been only for the purpose of identifying an individual, not for getting a peep into the secret gods that animate their beings. A post-script is in order here, if only to correct the balance. A cousin of mine sold the plot he had inherited to a Hindu builder, for the sensible reason that he offered the best deal. The relatives were aghast. A Hindu builder!!! How could he ever think of destroying the sanctity of his ancestral land for a few pieces of silver? Soon they would be muscled out of their sanctum sanctorum by a clutch of idol-worshippers! It is also very sobering to look at our neighbouring theocracy where its God-fearing denizens not just CAN’T create space for the infidel in their own hearts and homes, but are duty-bound to steadily hound the poor fellow out of his own modest shelter. What’s in a name? Oh, Plenty! I was born in a liberal Muslim family in 1950. There was nothing liberal about my name, though. Every one of the three elements was resoundingly Islamic. The mixed neighbourhood in which I grew up never found the name worthy of any notice. But some children at my school did. They found its association with a religious community a good source of entertainment – at my expense. Digs on beards, lungis, skull-caps, beef-eating and – the perennial favourite – circumcision. It never descended to fisticuffs, or even a decent sized brawl; probably I was too timid, probably I needed their friendship. So, no serious damage done. The evening of high-energy rompings in my lane with friends helped flush out whatever trace of inadequacies I might have carried home. It has to be recorded here that this peculiar variety of “innocent” ragging decreased as we moved into the higher classes, and disappeared altogether in college. Meanwhile, the world of my private thoughts and beliefs was also describing its own trajectory. The earliest feeling I can remember is a warm, unconscious acceptance of the benevolence of all super-natural beings across the religious board. This changed during my mid-teens to a sharp appreciation of the singularities of the faith I was born into. I got into occasional fastings and prayings and recitation of the Holy Book; the beatific glow on my face must have made a pretty sight. As I moved into my late teens, skepticism gathered strength. I was muddled, yes, afraid, yes; but I preferred confusion and fear to unsupported certainties. This was obviously the result of the company I kept and the books I read. Well before I got married at age 27, I was a full-blown, hard-core, unrelenting atheist; which also meant that I would marry someone who, at the very least, sympathized with my state of (un)belief. It thus happened that my daughter and son arrived to parents for whom any kind of unsupported belief was anathema. If they were to grow up as free-thinking persons, why, then, should they carry the mill-stone of being identified with a religion to which they bore no allegiance? Mill-stone it would certainly be – I had carried its weight around my own neck, albeit mildly. I had managed by deliberately projecting a secular persona. We had foreseen the demonization of the entire Muslim community because of the aggressive, intolerant fringe within and without, and we didn’t want our two kids to have to pay for a faith they wouldn’t even be buying. So we took care to choose religion-neutral names for them. We dredged out a suitably innocuous surname from our family archives, and rolled the kids out for easy assimilation in a rather name-obssessed society. The master plan was that they would marry outside the concern of religion, and free themselves and their progeny of affiliation with anything except good sense. They grew up with an indulgent irreverence for handed-down wisdom. The daughter, a 35 year old careerist now, does not want to marry only because society expects her to. She hasn’t met the right boy yet. The son, now 31, is happily married to a girl born in another un-faith. Before he met his girl, I had asked him whether he would marry a Muslim. “Why not?” he had replied. “All I would care for is compatibility!” His pat reply staggered me. It revealed to me my own insecurities (and the consequent warpings) that those “innocent” raggings had engendered. It occurred to me that as a first generation atheist I carried with me the passion of a neo-convert. My children often call me the Osama bin Laden of atheism. They are completely in consonance with the rational position, but they do not carry the same abhorrence for the faith their father does. They didn’t have to hack their way out of the smoky, suffocating, spooky, soul-destroying, yet strangely mesmeric space of gods and demons and prophets to break out into a world of human beings. A thought: could their neutral names have shielded them from the ravages to which I was subjected during early school? Our foresight had, it appears, helped them slip past the emotional vulnerabilities of childhood and adolescence. It could not insulate them altogether, though, from the morbid curiosity of a name-obsessed segment of society. Let me ignore chronology and recount the first event from Modi’s Gujarat, only because the subject lends itself to its most fashionable rendition there. My daughter has recently taken up a job in Ahmedabad. She had been alerted to the unbridgeable polarization that has taken place of the Hindus and Muslims since the 1985 riots, and later the Godhra riots in 2002. But it was only when broker after broker showed either unwillingness or helplessness to find for her a cosmopolitan area that the dimensions of the divide hit her. “Tamey Juhapura nu ghar dekho ne ben, ek dum A one chhey!” Or try Jangpura, or Shahi Bag, or any one of the ghettoes. Jodhpur? No. Vastrapur, Ambawadi, Bodakdeo, Satellite? Mushkil chhey, ben, mushkil chhey. The girl, however, was determined to beat the ban. She planted herself in a tacky guest house and lived out of a suitcase till she finally landed a decent flat in Prahlad Nagar owned by a Delhi Sikh. “Prahlad Nagar?” said the astounded Muslim auto-rickshaw man chatting me up from the railway station to my daughter’s flat. “What’s a girl from a good Muslim family doing there?” Question: Why didn’t my daughter hide behind her famous religion-neutral name? Answer: She couldn’t because some while earlier Prithviraj Chavan’s Mumbai had exposed its inadequacy to cover her culpability from end to end. Before signing the tenancy deal in Santacruz, she was required to go for police verification. That required identity proof. She flashed her passport which, alongside her sanitized name, carried her father’s name in all its triple-barreled glory. The landlord was livid. “Kai tumhi? Itkya mahattvachi gosht saangat naahi? (What did you mean by concealing such vitally important information?) We just don’t rent out our house to Muslims. The Society rules don’t allow it.” My son put this intelligence to good use when it was his turn to look for a flat in Mumbai. He did his house-hunting from behind his company-issued identity card. That didn’t carry his father’s name. When signing time arrived, he smartly let his wife do the honours. Her father’s name was too insipid to raise eye-brows or blood pressure. Further south, in Bengaluru, a few years ago, the story had been the same. The IT capital of the country, among the top ten preferred locations of the world, bristling with top educational institutions and bustling with its alumni, it had driven both my children up the wall with its “Saary, Amma, Saary, Saar, we can-not give our house to Muslims.” Let it also be proclaimed with pride and warmth that whether in Ahmedabad, Mumbai or Bengaluru (or Pune still earlier), my daughter and son have always managed to find gracious land-lords/ladies, all of them Hindus. For them the name has been only for the purpose of identifying an individual, not for getting a peep into the secret gods that animate their beings. A post-script is in order here, if only to correct the balance. A cousin of mine sold the plot he had inherited to a Hindu builder, for the sensible reason that he offered the best deal. The relatives were aghast. A Hindu builder!!! How could he ever think of destroying the sanctity of his ancestral land for a few pieces of silver? Soon they would be muscled out of their sanctum sanctorum by a clutch of idol-worshippers! It is also very sobering to look at our neighbouring theocracy where its God-fearing denizens not just CAN’T create space for the infidel in their own hearts and homes, but are duty-bound to steadily hound the poor fellow out of his own modest shelter. What’s in a name? Oh, Plenty! I was born in a liberal Muslim family in 1950. There was nothing liberal about my name, though. Every one of the three elements was resoundingly Islamic. The mixed neighbourhood in which I grew up never found the name worthy of any notice. But some children at my school did. They found its association with a religious community a good source of entertainment – at my expense. Digs on beards, lungis, skull-caps, beef-eating and – the perennial favourite – circumcision. It never descended to fisticuffs, or even a decent sized brawl; probably I was too timid, probably I needed their friendship. So, no serious damage done. The evening of high-energy rompings in my lane with friends helped flush out whatever trace of inadequacies I might have carried home. It has to be recorded here that this peculiar variety of “innocent” ragging decreased as we moved into the higher classes, and disappeared altogether in college. Meanwhile, the world of my private thoughts and beliefs was also describing its own trajectory. The earliest feeling I can remember is a warm, unconscious acceptance of the benevolence of all super-natural beings across the religious board. This changed during my mid-teens to a sharp appreciation of the singularities of the faith I was born into. I got into occasional fastings and prayings and recitation of the Holy Book; the beatific glow on my face must have made a pretty sight. As I moved into my late teens, skepticism gathered strength. I was muddled, yes, afraid, yes; but I preferred confusion and fear to unsupported certainties. This was obviously the result of the company I kept and the books I read. Well before I got married at age 27, I was a full-blown, hard-core, unrelenting atheist; which also meant that I would marry someone who, at the very least, sympathized with my state of (un)belief. It thus happened that my daughter and son arrived to parents for whom any kind of unsupported belief was anathema. If they were to grow up as free-thinking persons, why, then, should they carry the mill-stone of being identified with a religion to which they bore no allegiance? Mill-stone it would certainly be – I had carried its weight around my own neck, albeit mildly. I had managed by deliberately projecting a secular persona. We had foreseen the demonization of the entire Muslim community because of the aggressive, intolerant fringe within and without, and we didn’t want our two kids to have to pay for a faith they wouldn’t even be buying. So we took care to choose religion-neutral names for them. We dredged out a suitably innocuous surname from our family archives, and rolled the kids out for easy assimilation in a rather name-obssessed society. The master plan was that they would marry outside the concern of religion, and free themselves and their progeny of affiliation with anything except good sense. They grew up with an indulgent irreverence for handed-down wisdom. The daughter, a 35 year old careerist now, does not want to marry only because society expects her to. She hasn’t met the right boy yet. The son, now 31, is happily married to a girl born in another un-faith. Before he met his girl, I had asked him whether he would marry a Muslim. “Why not?” he had replied. “All I would care for is compatibility!” His pat reply staggered me. It revealed to me my own insecurities (and the consequent warpings) that those “innocent” raggings had engendered. It occurred to me that as a first generation atheist I carried with me the passion of a neo-convert. My children often call me the Osama bin Laden of atheism. They are completely in consonance with the rational position, but they do not carry the same abhorrence for the faith their father does. They didn’t have to hack their way out of the smoky, suffocating, spooky, soul-destroying, yet strangely mesmeric space of gods and demons and prophets to break out into a world of human beings. A thought: could their neutral names have shielded them from the ravages to which I was subjected during early school? Our foresight had, it appears, helped them slip past the emotional vulnerabilities of childhood and adolescence. It could not insulate them altogether, though, from the morbid curiosity of a name-obsessed segment of society. Let me ignore chronology and recount the first event from Modi’s Gujarat, only because the subject lends itself to its most fashionable rendition there. My daughter has recently taken up a job in Ahmedabad. She had been alerted to the unbridgeable polarization that has taken place of the Hindus and Muslims since the 1985 riots, and later the Godhra riots in 2002. But it was only when broker after broker showed either unwillingness or helplessness to find for her a cosmopolitan area that the dimensions of the divide hit her. “Tamey Juhapura nu ghar dekho ne ben, ek dum A one chhey!” Or try Jangpura, or Shahi Bag, or any one of the ghettoes. Jodhpur? No. Vastrapur, Ambawadi, Bodakdeo, Satellite? Mushkil chhey, ben, mushkil chhey. The girl, however, was determined to beat the ban. She planted herself in a tacky guest house and lived out of a suitcase till she finally landed a decent flat in Prahlad Nagar owned by a Delhi Sikh. “Prahlad Nagar?” said the astounded Muslim auto-rickshaw man chatting me up from the railway station to my daughter’s flat. “What’s a girl from a good Muslim family doing there?” Question: Why didn’t my daughter hide behind her famous religion-neutral name? Answer: She couldn’t because some while earlier Prithviraj Chavan’s Mumbai had exposed its inadequacy to cover her culpability from end to end. Before signing the tenancy deal in Santacruz, she was required to go for police verification. That required identity proof. She flashed her passport which, alongside her sanitized name, carried her father’s name in all its triple-barreled glory. The landlord was livid. “Kai tumhi? Itkya mahattvachi gosht saangat naahi? (What did you mean by concealing such vitally important information?) We just don’t rent out our house to Muslims. The Society rules don’t allow it.” My son put this intelligence to good use when it was his turn to look for a flat in Mumbai. He did his house-hunting from behind his company-issued identity card. That didn’t carry his father’s name. When signing time arrived, he smartly let his wife do the honours. Her father’s name was too insipid to raise eye-brows or blood pressure. Further south, in Bengaluru, a few years ago, the story had been the same. The IT capital of the country, among the top ten preferred locations of the world, bristling with top educational institutions and bustling with its alumni, it had driven both my children up the wall with its “Saary, Amma, Saary, Saar, we can-not give our house to Muslims.” Let it also be proclaimed with pride and warmth that whether in Ahmedabad, Mumbai or Bengaluru (or Pune still earlier), my daughter and son have always managed to find gracious land-lords/ladies, all of them Hindus. For them the name has been only for the purpose of identifying an individual, not for getting a peep into the secret gods that animate their beings. A post-script is in order here, if only to correct the balance. A cousin of mine sold the plot he had inherited to a Hindu builder, for the sensible reason that he offered the best deal. The relatives were aghast. A Hindu builder!!! How could he ever think of destroying the sanctity of his ancestral land for a few pieces of silver? Soon they would be muscled out of their sanctum sanctorum by a clutch of idol-worshippers! It is also very sobering to look at our neighbouring theocracy where its God-fearing denizens not just CAN’T create space for the infidel in their own hearts and homes, but are duty-bound to steadily hound the poor fellow out of his own modest shelter.
Posted on: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 06:08:26 +0000
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