Getting modern is dropping name 'tails'

Like no one has a hand in getting born, nobody also gets to choose his or her own name, at least the one given after one’s born. While most of you must be fortunate that your elders gave you an easy name to pronounce and spell, and catchy enough to stand out, some of you may have got hitched with a ‘difficult’ or old-fashioned one.

Earlier, truncating or ‘westernising’ one’s own name was mostly undertaken by NRIs. Parminder would become ‘Parmy’, Anuradha ‘Anu’.

Now, thanks to the power of taking one’s name into one’s own hand via legally acceptable identification markers like passport or Aadhaar, or even less legally valid names saved in delivery apps, people are ‘modernising’ their names more easily.

It turns out that Gujarati pride in suffixes like ‘behn‘ and ‘bhai‘ are giving way to, well, dropping these ‘honorifics’ that sound a tad twee in circa 2023.

Gujaratis approaching the Passport Seva Kendra in Ahmedabad, Vadodara and Rajkot to have these suffixes surgically removed is reportedly trending. It has been going this way for a while now.

More than a decade ago in 2012, the birth and death department of Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation was reportedly inundated by applications to remove such suffixes – some 67% of the applications. Sounding dowdy is good enough reason to snip tradition. And, once again, Gujaratis are showing the way.