Musing on names

I have read about few great people commenting on names or the insignificance of names.

You must have definitely come across Shakespeare's famous quote "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet" from Romeo and Juliet.

I know J.Krishnamurti, the great philospoher, had some strong views on names.He felt naming something moves us away from it. Infact he named the school that he founded "The School". JK also wrote a poem which starts with the lines
"I have no name,
I am as the fresh breeze of the mountains"

Dale Carnegie says in his much acclaimed book "How to win friends and influence people" that a person's name is the sweetest sound on earth for him or her and remembering someone's name is a great way of making friends.

I don't debate the need for a name. I can't imagine calling people by numbers, like "Hey 502" as police officers call constables in Tamil movies or for that matter "hey yellow shirt" or something like that. Names are really helpful in some ways. However I have a feeling that names mostly always end up being ironical and the person ends up being the opposite of what the name literally stands for. I had a person called "Arockiadas" in my team some years back. Arokiam in tamil means healthy. Arokiadas however the most unhealthy person I have ever met. He used to take leave very frequently on health grounds. In fact We used to call him "un" arockiadas.

I have comes across many such examples but the latest addition to this list of names and in support of my theory is "Satyam" thanks to Ramalinga Raju's "Satyam computers". I am sure you would have heard about the latest scam that has come out. "Satyam" means truth in Sanskrit. Ramalinga Raju could have proved my theory wrong, if he had done whatever he did with "Satyam", with "maytas"instead , because maytas atleast in the way the name has been arrived at is the reverse of satyam :-)