TALK SHOW with Jay Dino:

A Rose by any other name smells as sweet?

Juliet, the most famous female lover in modern history spoke these words when she tried to tell herself that its not the name but the person that she loved. So would she love Romeo even if he had another name?

Just a month ago a Sri Lankan woman expecting her first born started searching for a name for her daughter to be born and after studying a whole book of names decided on Juliet. Her close family members worried “What if the child doesn’t live up to her name?” What if she turned out to Ugly Betty as the TV series is named? And who is going to be her Romeo? Just passing concerns. The decision was made. When she was asked the mother said, “If it was a boy I would have named him Julius.”

Another Sri Lankan mother consulted a name pundit and the answer was “find one with three letters and beginning with A.” How about all those ‘A’ names Amila, Anoma, Amali, Amy, Anagi? How to choose? If you chose Anagi it had three letters in Sinhala but five letters in English. If you chose Amy it had three letters in English but only two in Sinhala. So the mother chose Anagi and Amy and left it to her husband to decide. The husband’s grandmother had been Amy and so Amy it was.

What if you decided to choose not only your first name but also your last name? One young man named Fernando thought he wanted to sound less Portugese or Spanish and decided to transfer his ‘geh / gay’ name from the front to the back. So he became Kurukuladittiya instead of Fernando and since he was a medical doctor practising in UK, later on, after he went there, the nurses finding it difficult to pronounce that ‘jaw breaker’ would announce on the hospital asking for Doctor Kuru Kuru. “I might have sounded more European had I kept Fernando,” thought Dr Kuru Kuru but kept his thoughts to himself. “What does Kuru mean,” asked a pretty Italian nurse, from Dr Fernando and without blinking an eyelid he replied “It means elephant size.”

Recently there was a Hindi film titled ‘The Namesake.’ It was shown on HBO in the Dialog network in Sri Lanka. A young Indian professor, in an American university, comes home to find a wife. The parties meet at the girl’s home ,with both families in attendance. “What are her academic qualifications?” asks the boy’s father and the girl’s father makes the signal for her to proclaim them. She rises and declaims:

I wandered lonely

as a cloud

That floats on

high over vales and hills

When all at once

I saw a crowd

And the boy’s father ends it for her in his loud male voice: “I host of golden daffodils.” She is passed for marraige.

When her first baby is born in an American hospital, in the cold of winter, with no mother in attendance, she is both overjoyed and sad. Her husband is there for her. Just as she is about to leave the hospital, the doctor comes and asks them for the child’s given name, his first name. “That’s given by the grandmother,” replies the parents, “that’ll take time. She hasn’t been told yet.”

“But no,” says the doctor, “according to American law the child’s name must be registered before leaving hospital.” The father is at a loss. Into his mind comes the name of his favourite author: “Call him Gogol.”

The theme of the film is how the child grows up fighting to escape from the implications of being named Gogol, the author who reveled in describing misery.