What's in a Last Name

PART I

 

Have you seen a guy roaming around the streets, unshaven, in ragged tatters for clothes and sleeping on park benches?

No. Stop right there. That’s not me. That’s a guy without money. I’m a guy without a last name, which contrary to what you may think, is an intangible form of wealth.

I hail from the southern part of the Indian peninsula, almost the tip of it, if you want to be specific. Where I come from, people have been living for centuries and millennia, without the need for a last name. People were born, people procreated, more people were born and the racket continued without anyone coming and asking us what our last names were.

Suddenly, some of us decided to migrate abroad, to the United States and elsewhere. That meant passports. That meant forms which had a column the smartest of us couldn’t complete because they wanted to know what our last name was. The consulate did not seem to agree with our views on the redundancy of a last name.
We came back, dejected, devastated. That night, at a roadside restaurant, the frenzied discussion was all about this.

“Machan, what’s a last name da?” asked Vijaykumar, with his mouth full of Dosa.

“What’s in a last name?” misquoted Ramesh who was known for his puns and would later become a celebrity on Twitter.

“Dei, hit that fellow. Some of us here are struggling for survival and he’s making bad jokes as always.”

After a gentle nudge from Swamy, Ramesh kept quiet.

Vijaykumar repeated, “What IS a last name? They never asked you for one at school, right?”

Krishna cleared his throat. His father was in the Railways. He had spent some time in places like Delhi and Bombay (collectively called “North India”) and was considered to be an authority on all things wheat and Hindi.

We all turned our attention to Krishna. “Yaar, see.” We chose to ignore the “Yaar” which we considered to be some kind of infection Krishna had picked up.

Krishna continued.

“I have seen North Indian names split into two parts. They call the second part as the last name or surname. It comes from father to son, like Male Pattern Baldness, you know.”

“OH, like we use initials?”

“No, no. Initials are the first letter of our father’s names, which means that you and your son would have different initials, provided you put some imagination into naming your kids. But surnames remain the same, over generations, over centuries, sometimes.”

“Oh! Interesting” Vijaykumar said, drawing out the “interesting” on an unnaturally stubborn piece of Dosa.

“But what’s the point of having one? You are called by your first name and that should be enough to identify you, right?” This was Karthik, who shared his name with a flock of Karthiks and never seemed to have a problem with it. The others though, would refer to him as the “short” Karthik, as opposed to the “tall” Karthik and the “thin” Karthik and the “C” Karthik who spelled his name as “Karthick”.

“Ok, fine. I don’t see any point to this. Let’s assume that we all need surnames or last names, whatever they are. It could be a conspiracy that the West has imposed upon us, but I really don’t see any harm in having one. I have always been happy that I had a short name. A long name would have been a pain when you are filling up forms. But it looks like it’s more of a pain to not have a last name. I think we should start thinking about what names we want to have.”

Swamy was a practical kind of a guy. He categorized anything that involved effort as a pain but had the accuracy of a monsoon mosquito in picking out the least painful path of action.

“Swamy is right. We can’t deliberate upon this while scarce visas are being distributed to those privileged to have been born with a last name.”

“So do we get to choose what last names we take? Because, I didn’t have much of a choice with my first name.”

As the others-proclaimed (I presume this is an opposite of self-proclaimed, which seems to be the norm these days) nerd of the group, it was my duty to speak up.

“I think we should learn a little more about this last names/surnames business before we make our decision.”

As is the norm with meetings everywhere, be it the boardrooms of corporate giants, or the standing eatery Karthik Tiffin Center (This was an outlet run by another Karthik, whom we never had the good fortune of meeting), anyone making a sensible suggestion is immediately made in charge of working on it and producing positive results. This simple cause-effect relation has led to muted mouths in many a meeting. Forced alliteration notwithstanding, I took upon myself the onerous task of delving deep into the bowels of knowledge, also known as Wikipedia.

I will summarize my findings here. Turns out, Krishna was only partially right. In some places, the surname was inherited from the mother, like Harry Potter’s eyes, as Rowling drilled into all of us. And some places, perhaps to ensure gender equality, went the distance to have the surnames of both the parents hyphenated , and added to the child’s name, in the process denying the child the chance to write his complete name in the few given boxes on any form.
In England, some people were too busy or too lazy to come up with a name, so they chose the profession they were in at that time. Thus we had the butchers and the butlers, among others. This was a little unfortunate as the 20th descendant in the family of Butchers could testify. He was a vegan and was the butt of bad jokes on his food preferences. Talking of butt, we move to the next type of surnames in England, based on your body parts. Basically, if you were called names in your childhood, based on how you looked, you picked the least nasty of them and made it your surname. So, if you were a Longbottom, well, you get the idea. The Youngs and the Browns and the Whites were in the same category. Some people decided to choose the easiest way possible and added a “son” to their father’s name, thereby affirming their inheritance. The name of the brand you grew up hearing, “Johnson and Johnson” were actually “John’s sons” but chose to refer to themselves in this weird fashion.

I conveyed my findings to the group over some delicious chilli bajji. Swamy was the first to respond, although his response of “SSSSS” was variously interpreted as a reaction to the spicy chilli, or the irritation of having to think up a name or an attempt to say his newly created last name.

The first assured sign of success came from Vijaykumar who decided unilaterally that henceforth he would be known as “Vijay Kumar” and all his descendants, even if they were Kumaris (girls) would have the last name “Kumar”. Ramesh chose this moment to suggest that if Vijay Kumar named his daughter “Kumari”, she would be called “Kumari Kumar”. Vijay threw the oil-stained newspaper at him. Ramesh dodged it and said he would discuss the issue with his grandfather. The latter was known for his creativity, going by the tales he spun about himself. Ramesh would later be enlightened that he hailed from the Srivatsa gotra and might as well use it as his surname. Swamy decided to honor his father Subramaniam by taking up his name as his last name. We decided to celebrate the birth of these new names by ordering another round of bajjis for everyone and telling the bhajji anna that he should consider getting a last name for himself.

The success with the last name was not replicated at the American consulate. They had forgotten to tell us that a last name was only one of the requirements. So we returned again, dejected and devastated but with a last name. At least, those of us who went to the Consulate. I did not. So, until that point of time, I continued to thrive with a single name, proudly flaunting my obstinacy to my friends. But that would change. 

PART II

Have you ever seen a guy, roaming around, pursing his lips and running his fingers through the lips of his purse, every time he has to use the metro? That’s not a guy without money. It’s me, a guy without a last name.

As you may recall, my problems started thousands of years ago, when my ancestors decided to not complicate their lives with the requirement of a last name. And so we went around with names that could be written down on a small leaf and tied to the rest of our wardrobe. And even after we moved to wearing dresses made of cloth, our penchant with single names had continued. Not that no one asked us to change. The resistance had been strong. After all, do we know if Socrates was a Sabharwal or a Sadovnikov? Or why none of the cities Alexander founded had his last name? Similarly, I told myself, the truly great do not use, or rather do not need, last names.

A few of my friends had, in a manner of speaking, gifted to themselves new last names. But my obstinacy (and frankly, the absence of a compulsion to visit the American Consulate, having not entered the hallowed premises of an institute whose abbreviated name started with two “I”s) prevented me from giving myself a last name. Vijaykumar, who later became Vijay Kumar, suggested that I follow his path and become Jey Sundhar. But that appeared lazy and frankly, purposeless to me. I had even got a passport without a last name which was, for a brief while, the source of universal envy. But trouble started after I moved to Russia.

In Russia, everyone had a last name, everyone. And sometimes, their last name was more unique than the first name, considering that I had met several Alexeys and Dimitrys, but no two people having the same last name.
I continued to flaunt around the fact that I had gotten so far (geographically, I mean) without submitting myself to the tyranny of the last name. Until I faced an even bigger problem than being denied a passport. I was denied a student pass on the Moscow Metro.

The Moscow Metro calculates fares based on the number of trips and not the number of stations. So, it was quite expensive if you travelled just a few stations. The teachers, from whom I was learning Russian, told me that I was eligible for a student pass and could get one if I applied.

The application process was right out of the bureaucratic planet of Douglas Adams. You had to get a form from the university, fill it up and submit it back at the university. The university sent it to the corresponding government department, and then you both waited, the university and you, I mean. After you waited long enough for a random passerby to call you a happy couple, the form returned. If it didn’t have any comments on it, you submitted it back at the metro station from which you had taken the original form. This is very important. Moscow may have several metro stations, but the forms are held at only a few, and you always submitted it back to the same station and in fact the same clerk you took the form from.

After submission you waited again, but this time, you have to periodically call on the clerk to see if your form and along with it, the student pass had come. Thus having laid the foundations of a good international friendship, we found to our dismay, we being the station clerk and me, that my form was not accepted. You don’t have a “Familia”, she patiently explained to me. No, no. I have a lovely family back home, parents and what not, I told her. “Nyyyyet, nyet nyet. This is not family, this is familia. A last name. You need a last name.”
I sat down with my teacher and we brooded about this, over a pack of French fries with nostalgia of Karthik Tiffin Center drifting in. “Why don’t you have a last name?” I explained the history of my people to her. She seemed fascinated.
“An entire civilization, thousands of years of history, and you people don’t have a last name?” “Civilizations are not built on last names. They are built on steamed rice served on a banana leaf.”
I got a pat on my cheek. Anyway, we digress.

Eventually, she convinced me that I should get a last name. Now, this was a problem. I, the guy who had adamantly refused to get a last name, and even refused a visa (not that it was offered to me, but hey, why should you be offered something to refuse it? I even refused the post of the President once) should I surrender to the tyranny of the last name?
“Get one, it’ll be fun.”
“I will think about it.”
“I have thought about it and I have decided to get a last name.” I told her one day as I went to recharge my metro balance.
“Does it have anything to do with this being the end of the month?” she asked with a grin.
“Well... But it will not be just any last name. It will be a name that conjures catastrophe, triggers terror and strikes fear in the hearts of people who ask me for it.”
“Now, what would that be?”
I did not tell her. But I had made up my mind. When I visualized the effect an “effective” last name would have in the heart of the hearer, I had seen the earth shaking, trees swaying, volcanoes erupting... volcanoes, wait that’s it. What was the name of that Icelandic volcano that caused chaos to air traffic and other things and became the only Icelandic word other than Reykjavik whose spelling you remembered? Yes, that’s it. Eyjafjallajokull. Now spell that out slowly in your minds.

“E Y J A F J A L L A J O K U L L”
Do you feel your heart beats skipping their rhythm in fear? Do you feel your breath going uneven, ready to run away from the scene where the name is even mentioned in a whisper? Yes, yes. That’s it. That’s the effect I want my new last name to have.

From now on, I shall be known as EYJAFJALLAJOKULL. Thou shall know me and learn to fear me.

**********

 

 

Where is Everybody?

Imagine living in a neighborhood, a really cramped neighborhood. You don’t have any friends and are bored of the people you are living with. But hey, your neighborhood is cramped, so maybe there’s someone out there. So, you look outside your window, but all you see are windows of houses taller than yours and roofs of houses shorter than yours. You want to meet new people, but haven’t seen even a shadow in any of the windows.
As time passes by, you grow more and more desperate and begin to write notes that read like the spam popups on certain websites, “Hi! How are you? I live here. Wanna come over?” But you get no response. You pick up small objects from your house and begin to throw them randomly at windows and walls, hoping to see a face, any face, even an angry one. But, nope, nothing. Zilch. “Where is everybody?”
And one day, as you stand under the shower, watching the water run down the grilled mouth of the drain, it hits you. “Maybe there is nobody out there! Maybe I am all alone.” It’s a scary thought. In all the expanse of this cramped neighborhood, you are alone. Absolutely alone. There’s no one else. Nobody to reply with a “Hello” if you mutter, or even yell a “Hi”. You stop the shower. But you’re still sweating.
You open that window of yours and put your towel out to dry. As your sweat cools, you begin to think. “How could there be no one out there? What happened to all the people who lived in these houses? Or did no one live here ever since they were built? Are those houses so bad? My house is good. In fact, it’s perfect. I get just the right amount of sunlight. It’s never too hot or too cold here, and everything is close by. In fact, this neighborhood is a realtor’s dream. I have lived here for such a long time, but I’ve not seen a single soul in any of the other houses. What is the problem?”
Your logical mind lets you arrive at a series of theories, all of which sound convincing. First of which, of course is the most obvious. There’s nobody out there. You. Just you. All alone. In the entire neighborhood.
That sounds too heady and too scary at the same time. But we know that there are all these houses in the neighborhood. How can they ALL be empty? Something else must have happened or must be happening. What is it?
The next theory is that the other houses have people. Of course. But the people are too young or too short to rise to the level of the windows and communicate with you. So, even if they have seen your messages, and are trying to respond, they are not able to respond to it in a manner that you can see and understand.
The biggest roadblock to this theory is that the other houses are as old as and in some cases, much older than your house. So, the people there must be at least as advanced in growth as you, if not more.
So, we come to the next theory. There were people in the other houses, they did grow, but they died before they grew tall enough. Something must be wrong in their houses that shortened their lifetimes. Some strange disease that spreads within the walls of the houses and kills all the residents. Some strange malaise that is triggered with time by the houses themselves, and therefore is contained to the houses. But this has happened individually in all the houses. A kind of a great cloak that smothers clans in their houses, separating the ephemeral ones from the relatively eternal ones. Is that a…great… filter?
At this stage, you’re scared again. Because, the thought of the great filter has sweated out all curiosity of the others from your mind. You are now extremely worried. If it is a great filter, and if it has ended lives in all the houses in the neighborhood, and if you are the only one left, how long do you have left?
Here we end the extended analogy I drew in order to simplify the Fermi paradox. The paradox is that we have high estimates of the probability of the existence of extra-terrestrial civilization, but we do not have any contact with, or evidence of such civilizations. Like living in a crowded neighborhood and yet, not actually seeing any neighbors.
So, let’s continue with the assumption that we are special, hell, not special, we’re unique in the true sense of the word. There’s only one tiny planet in an unremarkable solar system that has got complex life, ours. So, how did this happen? What happened to the Great Filter? Well, there are a few possibilities.
We already crossed the Great Filter
1. This possibility is based on the premise that the Great Filter is mostly in the beginning. Life on earth is an outcome of a complex set of factors that had to be present and function at just the right level for life to start. The click, that lightning strike, the second at which the primordial carbon chose to “breathe”, we have tried to recreate it in labs and failed. This implies that the probability of life on a planet is so close to zero that we are the only ones out there.
2. The Great Filter is in the beginning, but not so early. Life started in a lot of planets, as it did on earth, as simple prokaryotes. But these simple prokaryotes either never found the right conditions or the need to transition into complex eukaryote structures. If this is the case, then the universe is full of life, but most of it is similar to the bacteria we have on earth. There’s no way the bacteria-like lifeforms are going to reply to the signals we have sent from the earth.
While we’re on the Great Filter, some of the other theories are that the evolution of man was the Great Filter. But, no. The Great Filter, by definition, has to be “Great”. You remember the dinosaurs? The earth may have, according to the most accepted theory, been hit by an asteroid 65 million years ago wiping out the largest creatures ever to walk on land. But life survived and continued. So, that’s not necessarily a Great Filter and neither is human evolution.
So, according to this possibility, we have already crossed the Great Filter when life started on Earth, or when it became Eukaryotic. The only way now is up, to become as great as we can be.
The Great Filter is not Happening:
This possibility is based on the premise that, like humans, the universe itself has gotten “civilized” and does not go about ending civilizations with gamma ray bursts on planets. We have observed these things happening on distant galaxies (but because of the distance, we know that some of these events happened even before humans evolved, or even before life started on earth). If this were the case, then the universe has decided to keep the current civilizations intact, and among them, we’re perhaps the most advanced. And once again, until the universe decides otherwise, we’re destined to become as great as we can be.
The Great Filter…is coming… or we’re heading towards it
Well, in matters of the universe, not all is…err… sunshine. This possibility suggests that all civilizations evolve to a certain level of advancement, perhaps to where we are, and then something happens, like the cataclysms suggested before. Or (and this seems more possible, looking at where we are now) civilizations reach such a degree of advancement where their rationale gives them the power to capture and destroy planets, but their inherent craziness uses the same power to destroy their own planet. The End.
There’s another side to the Fermi paradox that goes along the lines of “There’s somebody out there. But they don’t want to talk to you”. But, that’s perhaps for another day.
Getting back to why I feel that the Pluto flyby is important for the Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter, as long as we remain a one-planet civilization, we’re vulnerable to the cataclysms such as Gamma ray bursts, or perhaps the transition of the sun into a Red Giant towards the end of its life. Honestly, there is a long time for that to happen, but no harm thinking about it now.
Based on the Kardashev scale and a complex calculation devised by Carl Sagan (again, perhaps for another day), we’re a Type 0.72 civilization. To be truly invulnerable to planet and even solar system-level cataclysms, we need to become a Type 3 civilization and have complete mastery over the resources of our entire galaxy. Closer to reality, we believe we need another 100-200 years to have mastery over the resources of our own planet and we haven’t been able to even imagine how to harness the energy of our host star, the sun.
But fear not, friends.
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
Or before the Great Filter kills you and me.

KAZAN : Kremlin and Beyond

 

When I got out to “roam around” Kazan at 7pm, the city looked like it had been lit by a thousand incandescent bulbs, each of their light bubbles licking up the borders of the next to form one giant bubble that swallowed up the city. It was June 20, the evening before the Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere. So, the sun was still shining.

I picked up a map from the hotel reception and was poring over it. The receptionist told me that the Kazan Kremlin was not to be missed. I smiled at the fact that in Kazan, like in other parts of the world, places that were once centers of power, were now centers of attraction. What people once feared, now they took selfies with.

The Kazan Kremlin, like other Kremlins scattered around Russia, was a fortress. Most old cities of Russia had a Kremlin. Sometime in the 18^th and 19^thcenturies, most Kremlins were torn down, perhaps with the realization that war wasn’t going to happen, or that if war came, the Kremlin offered no significant protection. Only a dozen or so survive. This made the Kazan Kremlin even more of a rarity than it would have otherwise been. I decided to head there first.

Squinting my eyes as I got out (the sun was still shining), I walked down the road that Saturday evening. The road quickly began to rise up. The two dimensional map had not been able to explain this projection. But then, I have always liked walking uphill. It made me feel alive.

Even if the heart was merely pumping the same blood, a little more frantically, I felt as though new blood was flowing through my legs. As I turned a curve on the road, the Kremlin became visible to me. At first sight, it couldn’t have been more different from the Moscow Kremlin. It was white and the walls were definitely not as high. The insides too were very different. But I did not know that then.As I walked up towards the Kremlin, I realised that it sat on top of a small hill that looked like an upturned copper cauldron (one of the stories behind the name Kazan). The hill would have provided a good vantage point for the rulers to look upon the city.

The most striking thing when you reach the Kremlin is the monument to Musa Chalil, a poet and resistance fighter of the Soviet Union. Musa stands with his arms pulled back by strong barbed chains that have also bound his legs. But the upturned face and the look of defiance that the sculptor managed to capture on stone, gives you the feeling that any minute now, with a tug of his powerful shoulders, Musa would break the chains and taste the freedom he craves for. I’m almost reminded of Sivaji Ganesan from Manohara

waiting to rip his chains apart.

After a picture, I move into the Kremlin itself through the Spasskaya Tower. After a walk around the abandoned monastery and the history museum, I come face to face with the newest building inside the Kremlin, the Qol Sharif Mosque.

 The mosque is named after the Imam who served there and died defending Kazan from the Russian forces in 1552. The mosque was destroyed during the invasion, but it is speculated that its design elements may have inspired the Saint Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow. The new mosque was inaugurated in 2005 and can hold 6000 worshippers. With the mouths of its tent like blue dome, the mosque would look like a blue lotus blooming on the Kazanka River if seen from a distance. I stepped back a few steps to cover the magnificence of the mosque within the frame. Another few steps and my back would have hit the Sooyumbike Tower. Which would have been quite unfortunate because the tower is already leaning.

The Sooyumbike Tower is the Russian answer to the Leaning Tower of Pisa (although the former has been stabilised and no longer leans). There is no clarity on the exact date of its construction, although there is a popular legend that Ivan the Terrible built it within a week. The legend says that Ivan was smitten by the beauty of the Tatar queen Sooyumbike and built the tower as she demanded. But once it was finished, the queen jumped from it killing herself. The legend is untrue but makes for an interesting story. Consensus now leans (no pun intended) towards the Tower being a pre-Russian construction, by the Khans as similar structures were built in Central Asia by other Khans.

Next to the tower stands a grand arch that must have been the entrance to the palace of the Khans. The arch now looks down on a glass covered enclosure below the ground. These are the graves of the Khan rulers of Kazan (the last of whom was Sooyumbike). An attempt to click the graves resulted in my reflection on the glass getting on the camera, mildly scaring me.

 

Going further, the Kremlin ends with a curve to the right. At the curve is the Tainitskaya or Secret Tower. The tower itself is not a secret, and is quite visible. It held a secret passageway to a spring well, which came in quite handy during sieges.

From the Tainitskaya tower, the walls curve to the right to the Palace of the President. Kazan is the capital of the Republic of Tatarstan, a republic of the Russian Federation. The head of the Republic is the President who lives inside the Kremlin. Next to the Presidential palace is the Annunciation Cathedral which was built on the site of the mosque of the Khans. The walls, ceiling and even the pillars of the church are painted with stunning frescoes, with imagery of Orthodox Christianity.

After taking a few pictures of all the monuments, I considered my Kremlin tour finished and decided to explore the rest of the city. After all, the city is more than the old fort from which it was ruled. But about that in another post, perhaps.

*********** 

Signing off with a few more sights from quaint Kazan!!