Kamal Ghorui
We live in a world inhabited by people with names like Anaya, Alaya, Ahaana, Aarav, Vivaan, Revaan, Rian and Saanvi, to name just a few.
There is a distinct phonetic universe that they reside in, and it is one that bears little relationship with the past.
One thing that jumps out about how names have evolved is in how they have shed weight over the generations. In the oldest generation, names were elaborate monuments, honouring where they came from and whom they revered.
They were anchored in Sanskrit roots; phonetically, they were dense with consonants and needed both muscularity and deftness of the tongue to be pronounced correctly.
A lot of them were salutations to a variety of divine inspirations.
Names like Lakshmi Niwas, Bhuvaneshwari Devi or Goverdhan Prasad were not merely labels, they were installations.
These were names that came out of a strong connection with the past and represented a strong desire for cultural continuity.
As we move into the middle generation, the names become sleeker and less ornate. We see the emergence of names like Rajesh, Ravi, Sumit, Sangeeta and Amit.
These are phonetically unfussy and seem designed for a world of transactions and everyday life.
The ideas they evoke are born out of more everyday inspirations- names like Sanjeev, Prakash, Pankaj, Sunita, Sudha lack the grandiloquence of a Hargobind or Kamalkishore.
They represent a balanced compromise between the ancient anchor and the modern sail. They still have structure, but they no longer carry the weight of a social gravitational pull.
But then we reach the present, and the names suddenly trail off into airy escape. In names like Aria, Vihaan and Miraya, the phonetic profile has shifted from the solid to the gaseous. These names consist almost entirely of vowels and liquid consonants.
They are aspirated, wispy and intentionally lacking in thud. They don’t land audibly; they drift wispily. They are practically indistinguishable from one another, almost formless air that floats out of the mouth. It is almost as if they are allergic to the substance itself.
This is not merely a change in fashion but a profound psychological shift. Their names are not moving toward a new identity so much as escaping from the burden of an older world.
To give a child a name like Om Prakash or Bimal Devi was to hand them a heavy suitcase filled with the ghosts of their ancestors. Modern parents, seem to view this kind of gravity as a liability in a world defined by digital mobility and nomadic capital.
What these names represent is a desire to keep the slate as blank as possible. Light in meaning and airy in sound, these names are the acoustic equivalent of a translucent smartphone case.
A name like Amara or Ahaan is like a blank cheque for the future, a vibe rather than a definition. It can travel globally without getting identified in any tangible way.
The strange part of this movement is that the escape from the specificity of the past has created a certain phonetic homogeneity. All these names sound the same. Without the mooring of consonants, they hang in the air without landing, each name a somewhat vacuous intention rather than fact.
Because they have stripped away the hard consonants that provide linguistic contrast, the names have become a blur. The mouth searches for something concrete to pronounce but finds itself adrift in dreamy vowel-land, unable to find shore.
The desire to give every individual a fresh starting point has made all of them sound the same.
This shift is not accidental for it is located within a broader movement. As we move from the industrial age, where value resided in the heavy and consequential to the Information Age, where value is a virtual transfer of intention, the names have followed suit. We have moved from giving names to children that rooted them to the earth to releasing them to the sky.
This same slimming down is visible in other aspects of our lives- in our objects, our buildings, and our social ties. We live in an era of the fingertip and thumb.
Hard drives, discs and buttons have given way to the cloud, streaming and swipes. Our names fittingly are now user interfaces rather than monuments. They are the phonetic versions of the digital world.
How does this change how the person views themselves? At one level, it must be enormously freeing to have no cultural expectation to answer to. A heavy name creates a burden of expectations; a Saroja Kumari is meant to live within a defined ecosystem of behaviour and custom.
They bury the individual under the weight of a collective past, giving both security while restricting one’s degrees of freedom. To carry a weightless name, on the other hand, is a form of freedom that puts enormous responsibility on the individual to become somebody, to make the name consequential.
One is a spark of light detached from any particular fire, a fragment without a whole that it comes from. It represents both liberation and exile.
As the solid turns into air, and the physical into virtual, names tread softly, billowing out into the world. These names sound like the future because they shun the gravity of the past.
But in doing so, what does the individual come into the world with?
And what gives them something to hold on to?
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