The bard might have said 'What's in a name?' but given his genius, it is hard to believe he thought names were trivial labels. While names do allow us to identify someone, that is not all they do.
In high school, I met with a doctor for the annual health check-up every student had to undergo. From his list, he read my name and, given its tautological makeup, asked me, amused, why I had a two-word first name, with both the words heralding the same divine entity. I had never given it much thought. I paused and then said: "I don't know. But, names are anyway abstract nouns." Looking back, I am glad my English teacher was not within earshot.
Equally, I find the notion that names denote an abstraction pleasantly insightful, insofar as how I have come to use names, especially the monikers. Till friendships were restricted to conversing with "like-minded" peers about the textbooks and exams, I honestly saw no need for nicknames. In fact, I always wondered what inspired people to coin these terms. Then, in college, having finally found living by the textbooks rather sterile, I chose to befriend people who I thought could teach me to look beyond the black and white. And I did find some.
Interestingly, as I learnt more and more of them and acquaintances evolved to friendships, I found myself referring to my friends by names other than those they had been christened with. Paying more attention to the process, I recognized I was lumping together the traits I saw in them and finding a descriptive word that could capture the essence of this lump. So, the high school classmate who had become so proficient as a singer, her tunes and the lilting notes of her temperament drowning out my juvenile irritation towards her for the special treatment I believed she had received at school, became nightingale - not the most imaginative enterprise, I know. Nightingale was shortened to 'gale once I felt, based on her thoughts and writing, she was hip and not entirely bridled by the Carnatic music she trained in. Another friend who had this thing for pink, seemed innocently charming in how she dealt with me - I say this because she claimed she had been branded arrogant by some others, had this bubbly self that was very much the antithesis of my well-practised sobriety, had to endure being called Gudiya. Fatwa was the friend who denounced actions and ideas because they ran counter to those sanctioned by society, trying, perhaps, to break into the lattice of social acceptability.
The names were sometimes the product of a much simpler exercise - translation. These names, however, went through a centrifugal churn. The qualities that the name implied but I could not detect in the person were cast off - a procedure that was triggered by any significant encounters with them. Eventually, these names too acquired a compressed sense mirroring my core idea of those they designated. Muse belongs to this category. Hearteningly, the inspiring person that this friend is, the name is justified.
I have also used adjectives as sobriquets, trying to refer to a person by that one quality that drew me to them. Of course, I have had to rescind some of these names on getting to know the people they were tagged to. A glaring example is Gorgeous. In hindsight, the name, I guess, was the progeny of an infatuation and the influence of English TV. As with everything else concerning an infatuation, the name was, needless to say, well off the mark.
Epithets are born of perceived similarities between a person and a popular figure, too, leading to the former being called by the latter's name. A colleague calls me Raghuvaran, not because I am knavish like the many characters the late Tamil actor played on screen, but because my voice reminds her of his.
In the case of all my friends whom I have nicknamed, the names serve an additional purpose. Whenever I'm peeved at a behaviour I find to be totally out of character with the person recalled by the name, I am forced to acknowledge my ignorance of their personalities and that the name was based on their persona. As such, I can attach little blame to them for my disappointment, one that is the fruit of my expectations.
Then, there are friends with names chosen by their parents in keeping with the joy, wonder and other emotions that seeped into their lives as the siblings of their newborns. Once you learn of the sentimental thought behind a name, it is hard to call a person by a different appellation. Nothing else can match the evocative intensity of the given name.
There are friends who have shortened their own names, some for convenience, some to announce that they have an existence beyond what their parents and other people from their past associate with them - the alter ego. The differences between the two egos, however, are not always as dramatic as those between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde!
People change their names, pursuing better fortunes based on the advice of their astrologers or to disown their former self and begin life anew.
A name, whatever its origin, is not a mere marker that just differentiates people, like the numbers assigned to examinees. A name identifies an idea of a person, whether held by themselves or those around them. So, I guess, the bard's question was rhetorical.
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