The Man With A Womanly Name
In this blog I hope to expound upon
that one question everyone who’s familiar with my full name invariably asks: “What were your folks smoking dude?” followed
by “Can I get some of that?”
I am 171 cm tall, 210 lbs. 25 year old
unibrowed economy class rendition of Chewbacca and my parents named me ‘Dibyajyoti’. Combine that with my
surname ‘Dasgupta’ and you have the
perfect recipe for missing out on that 18 marks question in Boards because
you spent 30 minutes filling the ‘Name’ section in your answer sheet! Bloody nonsense. Also I dread calling up my bank
because invariably the first question is “Sir, may I have your full name” followed
by an hour of painstakingly walking the fellow through all the 20 letters of
your name one by bloody one, at the end of which he will call you “Mr. Gupta” anyways.
Also I will never become a Roadie which, in retrospect, is the best outcome of having
such a name.
Till someone mercifully shortened my
first name to Debo, I had tried various things to claim back my manhood ranging
from playing Call of Duty at Veteran difficulty with the username BigBalls88 to translating my name in
Russian to sound bad ass (An effort I immediately abandoned when Google threw
up the translation as “Svetlana”).
I am not the only one either, even as
you read this blog, somewhere out there a Dibyendu is trying hard to prove his
heterosexuality and I wouldn't even go into the predicaments of ‘Ritu- Porno’.
Why do Bong parents name their kids so
unsexy?
I have a little conspiracy theory surrounding
the whole ‘My-Son-Wimpiest’ contest that a lot of the Bong parents have participated
in and won resoundingly. But before going into the nitty gritties of Bengali
naming convention let’s have a cursory look at the Common Indian Parent aka
Parentus Indicus, of which the Bengali parents is an off shoot.
The Common Indian Parent hereby
referred to as CIP due to the author’s incurable lethargy, originates in the Indian
Subcontinent. However due to the recent phenomenon of Globalization and illegal
immigration aka Daler Mehndi, has spread across the world.
The CIP is an apex predator in his
ecosystem with not many adversaries. However, their offspring are highly
susceptible to the dreaded epidemic of ‘Independent’ and ‘Cool’ resulting in
such conditions as ‘Non-Engineeritis’, becoming ‘Roadie’ and in acute cases
putting a ‘Yo Yo’ in front of their names (symptoms for the latter include talking
incoherently in Punjabi about blue eyes and such while the voice mutates to
resemble an out of tune tin can).
Parents across India have devised
ingenious methods to counter this potentially deadly epidemic. For example in Southern
India they name the child named after Gods so as to induce piety and remove
any possibility of rebellion. If that
doesn’t work they are sent to one of 200,000 engineer manufacturing factories
which also go by the name ‘Corporate College’.
Up north in Gurgaon with the characteristic
scientific temperament and zeal quintessential of the Jats ,they went and banned
‘Chowmein’ but that’s another story.
(By ‘they’ I really mean the world
famous Khap panchayat which, as we
all know, is the Haryanvi chapter of Illuminati)
Of all the above mentioned and not
mentioned methodologies the most approved approach is the Bong approach. Bengalis have mastered the art of child “care”. Their technique is as simple as it is bewildering.
They name the male child as effeminately as possible (Face it, when you
meet a Soumik your first thought is “Gay”). Sheer ingenuity. You meet a 6’4 Bong
dude with rippling muscles and Greek God looks and are in the process of dream beheading him or
having a little orgasm, depending on who you ask, and next moment this man
mountain announces his name, “Rituporno”. Immediately all hostility/affection
evaporates to be replaced by a feeling of pity and hilarity simultaneously, leading
to that amazing feat of snorting out chicken tikka and Coke through your nose.
Trivia:
Q. What do
you call a macho Bengali?
Ans: A-Myth Roy
|
If Bible was written by a Bengali,
David would not need a sling or a rock or any such nonsense. He would simply
start calling Goliath, “Shonamoni” or “Baaptu” or “Tupai” and the Goliath would
immediately relinquish all his ferociousness, sit down somewhere in the corner with
a math book, write JEE and be a good engineer one day.
Have an unusually fierce dog that won’t
listen to you? Name it Shushmito. Problem solved.
Had Osama’s parents been Bengali
a lot of the miseries in this world would never occur. How can you even think of a
global jihad if your own name is Shayonton Sen Gupta?
Name a kid Zoravar and by the age of 5
he’s already committed his first murder OR you can name him Shayonton and be
assured of a lifetime of servility and predictability. Seriously dude, how can
you have a rebellious life if your name is Shayonton? And if
that’s not enough Shayonton will have a nick name also…Laaltu!!
The female Bengali child is not spared
either, being named after characters out of some obscure Bengali play, off whose
pages your great grandfather’s British bosses were eating jhaal muri.
They do however get off relatively better than the boys. At the end of the day a
girl can still carry off Modhumita or Kadombori or Cersei Lannister or even
Jhumpa Lahiri but how can you call a full grown man Bubai or Bhombol and expect
him to stand up for himself?
Also your average Bengali can never
get a cool punch line intro, “The name is Dasgupta, Dibyajyoti Dasgupta” just doesn't cut it.
Effeminate names also give out these
false signals to people. I distinctly remember a close friend’s ex-boyfriend’s
sense of relief followed immediately by outrage and bewilderment upon finding
out that she “hanged out with Dibyajyoti” and “Dibyajyoti is a boy”
respectively.
Even the relatively decently named
Bengali kids are not that better off. An otherwise normal and even sought after
name such as Vineet immediately loses all sexiness when put on a Bengali. Why?
Because then it becomes Bineet. When it becomes Bineet you don’t get laid.
The travails of being a Bong are
manifolds and would perhaps be best addressed in a separate book. A book that I
shall author immediately after I pass out of IIM A where, as we all know by now, the A (often mistaken for
Ahmedabad by amateurs) really stands for ‘Akhil Bharatiya Sahitya Parishad’.
With this, my dear reader, concludes my explanation
of the overt sensitivity of your Bong friend with a weird name about which he
will never utter a word by himself. He will carry the burden of pain within
himself because even if our first names sound like your fiancé, we are still Mards.
And Mard ≠ Dard.
Ciao.
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