I know a few Akbars. From venerated journalists and renowned artists to the guy who ran the tuck shop in college. Should they change their names to Maharana Pratap? This name-changing thing seems to be fun. And what about that old Bollywood movie? Amar, Maharana Pratap, Anthony, where Rishi Kapoor plays the namesake of my tuck shop owner? Apparently, there was also a Mughal emperor by that name – unmentionable now, rather like the name of that Scottish play with the three witches. Brings bad luck, I am told.
And what about Rishi Kapoor’s suggestion? He wants to change the name of the Indira Gandhi international airport. Excellent idea. Let’s call it the Indira Gandhi international aerodrome. How did all those institutions get named after Sanjay Gandhi, he asks, when Sanjay Gandhi was a destroyer of institutions, not their builder. And what price sports stadiums and parks named after sons or wives of that powerful family? Fair enough.
But it all gets very confusing when you think of that tyrant, the Shah of Iran and the many from western India who are named ‘Shah’. Do they need to change their names to Maharana Pratap too?
What if you merely switched the syllables of Akbar’s name? He would then sound like the US President most hugged by an Indian Prime Minister. Is that good or bad? Should all syllables be banned?
Remember Raja Todar Mall? He was Akbar’s Finance Minister, and therefore tainted by association. We’ll have to change the names of all our malls now. Prestige good, mall bad. Reliance good, mall bad. In the same class as Todar Mall, as one of the nine gems of Akbar’s court (Navratnas) was Raja Man Singh. We’ll have to find a new name for the male of the human species.
There are two ways out of this conundrum. One, Parliament could pass a law insisting that every Indian should be named Maharana Pratap. That way, in the years to come, all roads will not only lead to that name, but be that name. And imagine the fun in classrooms when the daily attendance is taken. With only one name to deal with, Aadhaar registrations become simple. Nandan Nilekani is probably kicking himself for not thinking of that.
A second path is through random letters. Name your child or road or whatever by generating a random combination of letters. That way, names will come with no history. Each will be unique, untainted by association, proximity, wars or disaster.
Jobless mathematicians have calculated that since the dawn of history, fewer than 110 billion people have lived on this earth. If you use only the 26 letters of the English alphabet to generate names, you will get something like 403 trillion trillion names (403 followed by 24 zeroes). That is comfortably more than the number of the grains of sand on earth. The only catch is that one of the random names will be “Akbar”. But that can easily be changed to Maharana Pratap.
Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu
