According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a namesake is a person or thing having the same name as another.
After a long time I went to see a movie alone… its just like all my friends were busy otherwise. But sometimes it’s not a bad idea to see movies like “The Namesake”. Actually everybody in the cinema was watching it alone. When you are abroad for a while, far from home, such stories about migrated Indians becomes more meaningful, and Namesake being about a Bengali family was easy for me to relate to.
While enjoying the Bengali dialogues in a London cinema, I felt as if I was rediscovering one of the most beautiful aspect of Indian culture the Family bond, (may be because parents are coming tomorrow ). True, we stay in the developed world get all the modern facilities; hang around in pubs clubs with friends and all, buy all branded clothes, study in reputed universities, work for the big MNCs, but still end of the day when we return home, we still crave for that Mother’s care, discussing hell lot of topics from sports to politics with Father. Most of us are so helpless that if required we cannot even fly to India on a short notice. Everybody is so alone here even with hundreds of friend around, especially the first generation moving here.
Even in the Chaos, pollution, corruption, of India there is the closeness of relationships, even the friends are often like relatives. I think it’s a unique trait in Indians that they try to find a relation with everybody, see how many aunties and uncles you had in the childhood. All the kids call you bhaiya/didi (well the trend is going now) or the most popular names for strangers Bhaisaab and behenji. It always reminds me of the pledge we were supposed to take in school “All Indians are my brothers and sisters (accept one)”
Now the word “Namesake” is again an interesting one, in Bengalis we have a trend of having two names one petname (daak naam) another Good name (bhalo naam) ,many of us have issues with our names…especially when your petname is like , guchhu, batul, bappa, piklu, tiklu etc and your goodname is like shudhangshu,shankhachakra,anudhyan,debargha and many more complicated and long names ,basically those words which were directly taken from Sanskrit and nobody uses them now, and to pronounce them correctly you have to be a Bengali aur a Sanskrit scholar . Sometime I think this is our way of saving those words from extinction, like naming a road in memorial of some great leader. The dilemma of Gogol Ganguli is faced by many… Bengali names sound too complicated to others. I remember I had tough time to make people pronounce Debarshi... I had to teach them from words like maharshi or even Arshad Varsi… and what I achieved is many versions of my name… Debasree, Deb-rishi, Debashi, DD, DDN, Debs, Deba and the most popular DEBU!!!
