The idiocy of naming people & birds

I donrsquot believe my siblings and I ever discussed our triplebarrelled names South Indian tradition requires that the first name be the familyrsquos place of origin and the second the fatherrsquos given name These two are mandated and nonnegotiable The parents have a say only on the third the childrsquos given nameIn my case this led to Chitoor Yegnanarayan Gopinath shortened to Gopi Despite its potential for toilet jokes it has stuckWe knew that our names were unwieldy unpronounceable and out of sync with formal naming conventions They would require elaborate cultural footnotes at parties In youth I would chafe when asked to state my lsquoChristian namersquo and a lsquoFamily namersquo though that colonial imposition has thankfully been modified to First Middle and SurnameHowever Irsquove never had a surname either South Indians have always been families without family names You have always assumed wrongly that my first name is my given name and the last my familyrsquosAnticipating complications in a digital Aadhaardriven world my siblings abandoned tradition and quietly became Narayans and are living happily ever after to the best of my knowledgeI remain the holdout and pay a price for it including sometimes being introduced as a village named ChitoorBut todayrsquos column is not about me Itrsquos about how mindlessly and cruelly we name the world around us not just our babies Where better to start than Elon Musk the worldrsquos looniest billionaire who has so far been presented with nine opportunities to name a child and blown it almost every timeAs part of his bit to solve what he calls the worldrsquos ldquounderpopulationrdquo problem Musk has tirelessly sired child after child with woman after woman blessing or dooming each of these babies with offbeat names only he could have dreamed up such as Saxon Griffin Azure and StriderMy heart goes out however to his two children with musician Grimes The first a son born in 2020 is named like the tracking number on a DHL package X AElig A12 Musk pronounced ExAshATwelveThe second a daughter born the following year is Exa Dark Sideraeligl MuskWhether itrsquos your child dog a rare bird or a new virus ego and power are involved in nomenclature You own what you name I was helpless when my name like a Neuralink chip implant was given to me Though I can legally rename myself once an adult as my siblings did tinkering with the spelling to improve luck is about as far as most people getBut why do I even need three names And if a place must be included why not Kottayam where I was born instead of Chitoor where no one I know was born Why is my fatherrsquos name there but not my motherrsquos Why should any parentrsquos name be there at all Am I my fatherrsquos son but not my motherrsquosWhich brings me to birds since we name them recklessly too If yoursquore a birdwatcher yoursquod be familiar with names such as Allenrsquos Hummingbird Bachmanrsquos Sparrow McKayrsquos Bunting and Lawrencersquos Goldfinch among hundreds of others You will not come across a Bhardwajrsquos Quail or a Charulatarsquos TwoTailed Sparrow and could be forgiven for concluding that all birds were discovered by men all of them whiteThe white Europeans who colonised the world and named its birds as though they personally owned them ignored the fact that native people had known those birds for centuriesWorse some of the white men who immortalised themselves by sticking their monickers on birds were enslavers white supremacists and grave robbers infamous in their times For example the Crimson Jamesonrsquos Firefinch is named after British naturalist James Jameson who bought a young girl as ldquoa jokerdquo in 1888 in Africa He then gifted her to a tribe of cannibals and later drew sketches of the child being stabbed and dismemberedEven John James Audubon founder of the Audubon Society whose name is synonymous with ornithology was an enslaver who mocked people trying to free blacks from slavery An oriole warbler and shearwater are named after himChange is coming to the naming of birds A society called Bird Names for Birds is aggressively pushing for a reevaluation to replace colonial bird names with more scientific or descriptive onesThe American Ornithological Society the worldrsquos foremost birding society announced last month after two years of discussion that birds will no longer have human names The names of North American birds that honour people will be replaced with words that describe their plumage and other traitsThat might be a good cue to reflect on whether we should name our children to please ourselves and show off our creativity or for their selfimage and selfrespect I only need one name for identification not three and since the South Indian system never had a family name and Irsquove never been to the village of Chitoor lsquoGopinathrsquo by itself feels perfectly adequatePerhaps I should have been a bird They might have called me a Brighteyed Bushytailed Gopinath Homo skepticus Or maybe Yegnanarayanrsquos WarblerYou can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopigmailcomSend your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper