Dear Mrs Clooney,
Ever since you got engaged to the world's most famous bachelor in April this year, you have been the object of much interest, speculation, envy and fascination by women all over the world
However, none of it appears to come anything close to the furore that followed your opting to take your husband's last name as your own this week.
Your quiet announcement of this on the website of your London legal firm, post your wedding, is said to have crashed the website and resulted in a cacophony of views, counterviews and criticism and response to it on the net.
Newspaper articles like 'Should we care that Amal Alamuddin has changed her name?', 'Amal chooses husband's name, oh please' and 'Put away your pitchforks and torches' were rife across the world.
"This fight has been on permanent loop for decades — and the feminists who fruitlessly perpetuate The Issue That Must Not Be Named are often unacceptably ignorant", said Eleanor Robertson in The Guardian.
The Telegraph's Daisy Buchanan said "Taking your husband's name is the ultimate feminist act", even as feminists weighed in with their dismay that they expected better from an internationally-renowned lawyer and a powerful woman in her own right.
Frankly Mrs Clooney, I don't know what the fuss is about. As the Old Bard had once said, 'a name, any name, is just another way of how sweet a rose might smell, right?' Or some thing like that.
As one who's known to have a slightly maverick and off-center approach to names, ever since unbeknownst to our parents, my sibling and I changed ours in school from that of our father's last name to his first on a whim, I've pretty much believed that you have a right to be called any thing you wished.
I have often tinkered with the vague notion that I would like to be known by the first names of both my parents as my surname.
Names like 'Running Water, Silent Moon and Singing River' have also appealed to me and often I contemplate embracing one of them.
Of course mercifully the work this will entail keeps me from that foolhardy enterprise, but it's a nice thought too and I do not rule anything out.
In all this name-calling, I think of Prince, who changed his name to a logo and Eminem, who on changing his from an ordinary white middle class one achieved instant street cred, and Bhagwan Rajneesh, who changed his name to Osho almost towards the end of his long and fruitful life.
Sometimes I've been taken with the idea of mononyms and at other times, names like Snoop Dogg and Yo Yo Honey Singh and Bubba Sparxxx along with all those hyphenated, unrelentingly cutesy names that Hollywood star couples give their kids, which appear irresistibly attractive.
But through all this I've known that each one of us has the incontestable right to be called by whatsoever name we please. No matter what society or our parents believe.
Our names, the first middle or last, only define us if we believe they do.
A young bride adopting the name of her husband could be an unconscious or deliberate act. It could spell subservience or as some columnists have opined-ultimate power.
Which is why your choice of taking your freshly-minted husband's name as your own has not affected me in the slightest.
I wish you and him the very best of a happy future together.
Er, what did you say his name was?
Yours sincerely etc
malavikasmumbai@gmail.com
The writer believes in the art of letter writing
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