What’s in a name? The Bard would not have raised the question in such a cavalier fashion if he had been around to witness the confusion a name like Alex Paul Menon could create in newsrooms.
When the Sukma district collector was abducted by Maoists on April 21, the surname ‘Menon’ was seen as a given to indicate the young IAS officer’s origins. Though someone pointed out that ‘Alex Paul’, being a Christian name, did not gel well with Menon, there was a plausible ‘clarification’: ‘His mother could be a Christian and father a Menon’. There was not an iota of doubt in the minds of anyone over his state of origin — it was Kerala.
Soon, as authentic information came in that he hailed from a village near Tirunelveli in Tamil Nadu, there was more confusion, which was cleared subsequently after a reporter sorted it out with the man who gave the name: Alex Paul’s father. However, some television news channels continued to describe him as a Keralite and a news magazine correspondent even reported that his parents had settled down in Tamil Nadu.
The truth was different. He was given the name Menon because his father was a great admirer of V K Krishna Menon, defence minister in the Jawaharlal Nehru Cabinet. It was just like some people in India giving European names to their children. Say, Boris. No, not after Boris Yelstin but after Boris Becker. Once a man wanted to name his daughter as Graf since he was an ardent fan of Steffi Graf. A colleague had to enlighten him that Graf is the surname of the tennis icon of that era. It is not clear if he settled for Steffi instead or went for some other common name. However, Steffis strut around, most of them having attended tennis coaching schools.
Similarly there are women with unseemly names like Moscow and Russia, pointing to the ideological inclination of their fathers or even both parents. The sweep of Communism has led us to a situation that we bump into a Marx here and a Lenin there. Even Stalins are aplenty in India, though Engels is not that common.
Oddly, there is even a Hitler in Nagercoil, a small town in Tamil Nadu, though no one is sure, not even the living Hitler himself, what his father found fascinating in the Führer.
Now we also have many Ambedkars outside Maharashtra. One such Ambedkar, a Tamil Nadu police official, recently spoke to a Tamil magazine about the joy and agony of having the name. Be it was during his training in the police academy or later on his job as sub-inspector, he gained an identity without asking for it. He was considered as ‘our man’ by Dalits or treated as an ‘outsider’ by non-Dalits without any question. The fact, however, is that he does not belong to the Dalit community. Only his father was an acolyte of B R Ambedkar.
Did Alex Paul Menon, too, face such misgivings before his abduction? No one seems to have asked him the question — not yet.
babujayakumar@newindianexpress.com