Dears I think Valmiki Faleiro's Herald Sunday Mirror article series on Goan names is quite hilarious. But underlying the humour is the fact that giving a name to a child is a political act. An act whereby the identity of the child is sought to be defined. Somewhere after India's independence and around the time of Goa's Liberation one can find many Goan Catholics were given "Indian" names by their parents - Valmiki is one, but also Rabindranath, Gandhi, Aurobindo ... and among girls Sunita, Anita and so on - obviously the parents were announcing their sympathy to Indian nationalism.
However some of the names that were given were given to children during Portuguese times were truly millstones around their necks. Often it was done to honour an ancestor. My brother was named Tertuliano, after a grandfather, whom someone had named after someone who was named after some obscure Christian writer. It was a name which my brother detested and so it was made more tolerable by shortening it to Tate, But that too became unacceptable after he went to England where he discovered that there Tate was a surname, and to be addressed by one's surname as in,"Hello Tate" was demeaning. So he switched to using his second name Antonio, which he further shortened to Tony! Now all these name changing shenanigans may create problems for his child in legal affairs as his documents bear different names. Of late there seems to be a trend of creating hybrid names from the names of the father and mother. But sometimes one wishes that the parents were a bit careful when they did this - I'm pretty sure it was a couple named Felicity and Abdon who stupidly decided to name their child Felon. I hope that a Mervin and a Dion don't decide to name their child Melon and a Donald and a Cornelia don't make their son a Con or worse Corny. Surnames are a bit more difficult to manipulate, but here too politics enters. A.K Priolkar exploited this in his clever attack on Goan Christians in 'Who is a Goan?' in Goa Re-Discovered, 1967, when he suggested that they should abandon the Portuguese surnames that came to them after conversion, and either revert to their original pre-conversion names or take up a suitably Goan Hindu sounding one by adopting the name of the village one happens to reside in - like Lotlikar, Calangutkar etc - in order that they appear more nationalised. Anyway, looking forward to see how Valmiki manages to manoeuvre his way through the treacherous minefield of names in his future articles. Cheers Augusto -- Augusto Pinto 40, Novo Portugal, Moira, Bardez, Goa, India E pinto...@gmail.com or ypinto...@yahoo.co.in P 0832-2470336 M 9881126350
