What is in a name?

By Shashi Narasimhiah

What is in a name? As it happens plenty! To the extent that it might even decide our destiny. No body (except for those few who went to the trouble of changing their names) chooses their name, it is the one thing that parents have a say in since it is decided before one can “say” anything! For some though, especially those who migrate to other countries, the name undergoes a metamorphosis by way of expansion of their initials making their name long.  Finally, since our identity is connected to our name, we all become proud and possessive about our name and most of us even love our names.

Often, at work and in public many of us with ethnic names including even someone as recognisable as Kamala Harris, have faced consistent mispronunciations of our names. The ordeal does not stop at just a mispronunciation of a name. One might argue that it is a minor matter, and we can live with it. But what is of significance is – those of us with such names, often are not considered part of the larger groups and get left out of several “mainstream” activities requiring us to constantly broadcast and reaffirm our presence, our talent and our ability to speak, read, write the mainstream language – English. People also often make uneducated conclusions about our ability to communicate, write reports, make presentations in front of a crowd and public speaking – all supporting attributes of a successful leader. These, although may not be the only factors coming in our way of being effective leaders, certainly have a major role to play in becoming and being one. 

Although many people don’t realise it, habitually pronouncing an unfamiliar name incorrectly is a form of implicit discrimination. It sends a message that “you don’t belong here” and “you are not important in this environment, so why should I take time and effort to learn it?”. It could be construed as a blatant or explicit message to the individual that they’re not a “normative” member of that environment or that setting. In some cases, they present as apparently wilful errors used to suggest our “otherness” or to draw attention to our ethnicity.

It is hard to imagine how an ethnic name such as Swamy or Sharma is any more complicated to spell and pronounce than many mainstream names such as Bartholomew, Montgomery, Zachariah. American comedian Hasan Minhaj used his appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show to correct the host on her pronunciation of his name: “If you can pronounce Ansel Elgort, you can pronounce Hasan Minhaj”. The clip has been viewed more than four million times on his Twitter page.

Changing one’s name to fit in happens more often than some may think, especially on resumés. Krishna easily becomes Kris and Hari becomes Harry, Jyoti becomes Jyo – for example. According to research nearly half of black and Asian job applicants who altered their resumés did so by changing the presentation of their name to erase/minimise any racial cues since it is a well-known fact that those who “main-streamed” their names were twice as likely to get call-backs for an interview.

Having noted the above, the flip side to the story is – there is nothing wrong in shortening our extra-long names for convenience and we often do so, but not at the cost of completely camouflaging the original name.

Currently some of the coping mechanisms we apply are:

• Many adopt a fictitious “mainstream” first name and “become” the mainstream
• Many new additions to the team make it easy by specifying their “preferred name”
• Some of us use a very short nick name (Jyo for Jyoti, Su for Sumati, Raj for Rajendra etc)

But measures like these do not amount to much when applying for new positions, going up the ladder within an organisation or to make a mark in a crowd. The stereotyping of various ethnic communities is ingrained in our minds. Regardless of any legislative measures that may be in place, more fundamental societal shift in attitude is required to overcome this bias. With the exponential “developmental catching-up” that the “developing” world has achieved recently, with the exponential increase in the number of ethnic leaders in places like Silicon Valley, one would think it may only be a question of time before this “shift” takes effect. It may not be wrong to argue that the “mainstream” need to be more educated about the positives of the rest of the world instead of depending on the biased image portrayed by the mainstream media.