Renaming craze hits image-crazy city

MUMBAI: Arvind Ubale hopes to be a new man in about six weeks. When he submitted the ‘change of name’ form at the Government Central Press at Charni Road last week, delight crept up on his face with a nervous smile as he anticipated shedding the burden of living with a ‘common’ name he disliked.

“I have three namesakes in my own gully in Andheri’s Aram Nagar,” said Ubale, 20. Christened by his grandmother, he lived with the name till she died last year. He now wants to be called Aniket.

In 2006, a whopping 52,137 Mumbaikars applied to the Government Central Press to have their new names published in the Maharashtra government gazette. In 2005, 45,151 persons changed their names. In fact, on January 2, this year’s first working day, 286 name-change applications poured into the press.

There are many reasons why people want to change names. Some do it to correct misspellings rendered in school mark sheets; others drop their surname in support of the idea of a casteless society. While marriage sees some women take on their husbands’ names, many seek renaming for numerological auspiciousness.

To put the name-change process in motion, one has to fill a form and pay a fee of Rs120 (Rs620 for gazetting it within a week). Once the new name is published in the weekly gazette, the change can made in all official documents such as passport and bank records.

“In today’s angst-ridden world, a person’s name is more than an identity,” said social psychiatrist Harish Shetty. “It can make you stand out in a crowd or make you an object of ridicule.”

Thus you have a Chiraunjilal in the satire Khosla ka Ghosla overcoming familial resistance to choose a name suited to his swish software job.

Or Gogol Ganguli in Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake rebelling to change the name his father gave him in honour of Russian writer Nikolai Gogol.