Column

Shakespeare had no foresight when he asked, “What’s in a name?” Today your name could get you beaten up by a mob hard on hearing and who can’t make out the difference between a Salve and a Salvi.

After all, why should they waste time on basic courtesies like asking someone’s name and hearing it right when presented with an opportunity to exercise their freedom of expression and beat up one hapless guy!

Obviously, Shakespeare wasn’t living in an age when mob justice has become a way of life and a name is all they need as an excuse. I mean, the only man who could’ve told us if the real name of one of his wives was Jodhaa is unavailable for comment.

But that hasn’t stopped widespread protests against an epic love story where Emperor Hrithik Roshan’s fitness diet of egg whites and fruits has been tossed out of the royal window by Queen Aishwarya Rai who feeds him dal baati and churma!

Someday politicians in other parts of the world will adopt this Indian attention-grabbing trick and use names as a potent weapon. Thus someone in Russia might make a biopic titled “Vladimir Illyich Ulyanov”, followed by a Russian politician demanding a ban on the film because he strongly believes no such historical figure ever existed in Russian history. Until someone points out that Ulyanov was better known by one of his 151 pseudonyms — Lenin!

Similarly, Shakespeare didn’t live in a country where politicians spend more time in renaming roads and flyovers than actually ensuring its good condition. Neither did Shakespeare have to endure a political system where your last name could be your ticket to easy glory. I guess life was a lot easier during Shakespearean times.

But then slowly people started taking their names seriously. So, during Adolf Hitler’s reign in Germany, farmers were not allowed to call their horses Adolf.

On the other hand, Swedish government got so tired of 40 % of its population using just 20 % surnames and most of them ending in “son”, like Johansson, it’s been urging most people with common names to change them with options from a computerised list of Swedish-sounding words.

Interestingly, some names have become part of our vocabulary. Like, the mineral springs and baths in a town called Spa in 18th century Belgium became so popular with people that its name soon became a lowercase English noun.

And Shakespeare never met a numerologist!