Say my fucking name.

A rose is a rose by any name, but what if you are not a fucking rose? It’s taken me 20-fucking-9 years to realize that I am fucked; ALL thanks to my name. Much as I love my parents, I might just sue them for it. “When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different, you know your name is safe in their mouth,” is what Sam deBrito writes in one of his posts and goes on to say that’s one of the best definitions of love he has come across. Very sincerely, if THAT really is the definition of love, I am TRULY fucked.

My name is by far the most phonetically challenging names even I have EVER heard in my life. Given the mail that comes to office and is addressed to ‘MR Jhoomur’, I was shocked to realize that perhaps to some my name sounds masculine… Or married since the other envelopes are all addressed as “Mrs”. And to think that I used to be upset about the fact that people usually laughed when they first heard my name. Like in school…

In each and every of the 12 schools I studied in, each new-student-introduction got more or less the same reaction… ‘More or less the same’ as the reactions changed in degrees of cruelty with each class. In the junior classes it was “Goodmorning my name is Jhoomur Bose,” followed by “BWAHAHAHAHA” from other three-feet tall kids. With the growing years, the kids would not hesitate in asking, “WHAT the hell is THAT name?” Even in schools where people had distinctly different names – like the Sikkim school where kids had names like ‘Tsering’ and ‘Dolma’ but no one found those funny – it was my name that was laughed at.

At the age where friends start calling each other by cool names, my name was severely deficient in the ‘cool quotient’. Y’know how Deepti becomes ‘Dee’, Rupali becomes ‘Pali’ and Jhoomur becomes… ‘Jhoo’? Jhoom? ‘Ur’? And if you call it ‘Joo’, that means lice in Hindi. You can well imagine the common joke when I was 12… Sigh. Worse still was the adolescent “falling in love”. You know how young girls would add their name and take on the second name of their object of affection? Well my name sure as hell did not gel with ANY of the surnames, even the ones I ‘tried on’ just to see if there was anything other than ‘Bose’ that it would rhyme with.

Then there were the regional distortions of my name. In the Hindi speaking belts it was always ‘JhoomER’ and the Punjabis, Sikhs and Delhiites would especially find it difficult to get that my name ended with a soft, sweet emphasis on the ‘u’ and not like someone was trying to say something more after they’d said my name. “Have you met Jhoom-er…Er, what? No, no, Jhoom-er” And then everyone would want to know the meaning of my name and no matter what I said, since ‘jhoomar’ in Hindi means a chandelier, people would wonder why my parents had called me a chandelier.

In fact my name has conjured many weird images in peoples’ heads. I remember going to interview this stick-thin model – who has subsequently moved to Mumbai after dumping her restaurant-owner boyfriend in Delhi – and as I walked in, she says, “Oh you are so small. On hearing your name I was expecting some huge, bindi wearing Bengali woman.” Given that I WAS fat those days, that didn’t go down well. I really wanted to tell her that since I was still young and quite naïve, her accent had suggested I was going to meet someone more sophisticated and since she was a “model” and all, how come she was dating the ugliest man I had seen on earth? Anyway, I didn’t say all that since my journalistic ethics were strong. Bitch.

Then there were the Anglo-Indians who pronounced the name in such a long, drawn out way that it ended up sounding like some long lost ape species, “The jhooomooor that is found in the jungles of…” In parts of Punjab, they could not pronounce the ‘jh’ and with their love for adding a double-emphasis (Hunny, Happy, Luckky, Tinna) and inability to say the double OO, my name became, “Chummer”. Yea…THAT. Now with me going global and meeting people from different parts of the world, it’s just getting better… French call me “Zoomurrr”, the Britons think the ‘r’ at the end is silent (it’s not), most people stare weirdly at my mouth when am saying my name to see how it’s said (and still get it wrong), some Australians call me “Jhoo” (cringes) and yet others will not call me anything but ‘JB’.

I am emotionally distressed, ok? Like when people name their babies and use a bit of both parents names… I can’t use either part of my name so naming my kids after me is out of the question. Even if I were to try, the kids would probably end up sounding like a brand of jam or something. And then if all this wasn’t enough, I realized that my name is the least romantic (read, sex-friendly) name. You really cannot say it during sex you know. “Oh baby, Jhoomur, oh” and that’s it. Orgasm delayed by the next 20 minutes.

PS: And THEN Barkha Datt asks me, “Why didn’t you put your real name on the blog?”

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