One Man, One Name: A Battle Against Nominal Imperialism

Men do not sin, Bhikku. Society makes them sin. If you teach a North Indian some English, he will of course want to write poetry.

-- The Diary, mid-April, 503 BC

Some people have all the luck. Bill Shakespeare, for example, is famous, homo and dead. All three are highly desirable qualities, and we, alas, have none of them. Bill, it would seem, has us completely beat.

Not so. As it turns out, we do have our advantages over old Bill. As anyone who reads these pages knows, we speak aught but the profoundest wisdom. Bill S., on the other hand, often spouted the battiest rot. Make no mistake. Bill was a sharp cove. The problem with him is that he was not much of a reader. Note, for example, that Bill famously made that most idiotic statement--"What's in a name?" If only Bill read this blog, he would have realized that there is, in fact, a lot in a name.

But perhaps we should begin at the beginning.

The last post on these pages contained a subtle question. One reader, Naveen by name, answered it correctly. At which point, we unfortunately mistook reader Naveen for another lad of the same name that we know, a classmate of ours. It was, we admit, a rather gross error. Reader Naveen, clearly, is as perceptive as he is wise. His taste in movies is second only to his taste in blogs. Verily, Reader Naveen is a prince among men.

Our classmate Naveen, on the other hand, is a man whom Allah did not equip with taste, or any other good stuff for that matter. Aye! Classmate Naveen is a philistine, a committed cannibal. His barbarism is exceeded only by his perversity. The man can write like good old P. G. Wodehouse. Indeed, if there were a Wodehouse imitation competition, Wodehouse would probably lose to Classmate Naveen. And yet, in what Classmate Naveen calls his blog, he writes ghastly rot. What's more, he supplements it with close-up pictures and in-depth analysis. Of his car, no less. What's even more, the man's an arsonist and exhibitionist. He sets fire to his laptop, takes photos as it burns, and puts them up on his blog. What's most, Classmate Naveen watches Hindi movies regularly and reviews them on his blog.

At this point, gentle reader, you ask: But doesn't this prove Bill is right? If two blokes, both called Naveen, can turn out to be such dramatically disparate examples of virtue and depravity, doesn't it show that the name got nothing to do with nothing?

As always, gentle reader, you are completely wrong, because you do not know the whole story.

It is easy enough to see why Reader Naveen is such a lovely person and Classmate Naveen is a bloodthirsty he-vixen. The seed of Classmate Naveen's evil lies not in his perfectly harmless first name, but in his villainous last name. I refuse to put it down on these pages, because I respect Classmate Naveen's privacy and the moral standing of this blog. A last name such as Classmate Naveen's is not a last name that ought to be indiscriminately written on one's blog. Suffice it to say that Classmate Naveen's last name has spawned his nom de guerre--Gogo CrimeMaster, whence Classmate Naveen is also sometimes called Gogo or Gogi. In fact, while we are at it, we might as well give you a list of Classmate Naveen's names:

1. Naveen,
2. Chakra,
3. Chakri,
4. Chokes,
5. Gogo,
6. Gogi,
7. Gogo Crimemaster, and
8. Dearchap

No doubt there are more. Fortunately, these are the only ones we know of. As our high school teacher would be have put it,

Classmate Naveen : Names :: Imelda Marcos : Shoes.

In short, Classmate Naveen is a philanomist, a name-collector.

"So what?" old Bill Shakespeare might have said. "It's just names. What's in them? Give Classmate Naveen a few more and let's get on with it." Bill Shakespeare, alas, would be wrong. His overly liberal attitude towards names is based on his ignorance of human nature. To be precise, Bill S. misses the fact that abundance breeds greed in men, not contentment.

In Bill S.'s idealistic world, a nominally well-endowed man like Classmate Naveen would be glad to lend a name to the deserving poor, like Reader Naveen for example. In real life, alas, a man with lots of names only becomes more and more territorial about each one of them. Indeed, immediately after the case of mistaken identity was cleared up, we got an e-mail from Classmate Naveen. Its subject line read Cease and Desist. It went to say, and I quote: "And you will delete the comment that contains my name in it. I don't know which rotter stooped to using my honourable name but it shouldn't be there."

Let the reader first note the tone of the e-mail. It is one that Louis XIV regularly took. But Louis XIV spoke in French, so nobody understood what he said. Classmate Naveen, on the other hand, takes the Louis XIV tone, in English. Secondly, let the reader marvel at the singular narrow-mindedness of the e-mail. Classmate Naveen is a man who gets a new name every day. Yet, he can't share the one he got for his first birthday. Thirdly, his name-lust has led him to call Reader Naveen--a most noble individual as observed earlier--a rotter. And so on, and so forth.

But let us not be harsh on Classmate Naveen. He cannot help his churlishness. His aggression is understandable. Classmate Naveen is a deeply conflicted individual; a brown man who studied in a high-class English-medium school; a Gult who speaks Tamil with a Shrewsbury accent; a man who looks like Chiranjeevi's sidekick and talks like George Bernard Shaw. In short, Classmate Naveen has the soul of Queen Elizabeth in the body of Superstar Rajnikanth. Give a man like that a cone of vanilla icecream, and he will start nuclear war. Give him eight nicknames, and he will behave like Louis XIV.

Comprendre, c'est pardonner. If Comrade Naveen sins, the blame lies with our society, which has made him a name-grabbing appelomaniac. Let us understand Classmate Naveen, and thence forgive him his cheap marwadi behaviour.

But let's not forgive Bill S., who used seduction and skulduggery to become famous in spite of being a jackass. "What's in a name?" indeed! The Third World War, that's what.