Timur the Lame's youngest son was Shah Rukh - must we protest over a name?

There’s a thick tome in our family. Bound in red leather with gold lettering on the spine and crumbling pages, it is brought out and flipped through every time a child is born. The Pauranik Abhidhan is a mythological dictionary of words and names from ancient Hindu scriptures, published in 1958 by one Sudhirchandra Sarkar.

Thanks to this gentleman, every person born in our family since the 1960s has been blessed with an incredibly old-fashioned formal name. As if to compensate, each of us has been bestowed with ridiculously frivolous nicknames of affection.

At least…

At least, they did not give us names that spark off social media furore, as Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor did by naming their son Taimur this week. At least, they had not gone into wordplays, like Shah Rukh Khan did when naming his third child AbRam, a mix of Prophet Abraham and Lord Ram.

At least, they couldn’t give us names that go down in history as “50 Ridiculous Baby Names,” as an American couple did recently by naming their daughter Hashtag. Or as an Egyptian man did by naming his son, Facebook, to honour the social media platform for igniting the Arab Spring.

Wah Taj…

Baby names are like the Taj Mahal to parents. If Shah Jahan could immortalise his love for Mumtaz Mahal with what became one of the seven wonders of the world, why can’t parents of today celebrate their love for their children with glorious names?

The same reason why so many parents wonder if their children are super-special (a Chennai psychiatrist once told me that she was fed up of parents who came to her to find out if their children were prodigies.)

Name trend…

Apparently, parents are choosing more unusual baby names now than a decade ago. According to Jean M Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University, US, of the 325 million baby names surveyed between 1880 and 2007, about 40 per cent boys received one of the ten most common names in the 1880s, while now fewer than 10 per cent do. Similarly, for girls.

Parents who give unusual name are also likely to have a parenting style that fosters uniqueness.

Playing with baby names

To be fair, it’s a pure parental privilege. If two people decide to go through the experience of parenthood — the sacrifice, the relentless (unpaid and unappreciated) labour, the stress, the lack of privacy, the time poverty, the burden of being a role-model, the financial drain, not to mention the risk of having children one may not be proud of — they do absolutely have the right to play with their children’s names — in any which way.

No one else has a say in it but the parents.

Timurid mess…

So why are we surprised when movie stars push the envelope further? They know they are special, they are different, they are creative, they are expected to defy conventions. How can their children have tedious everyday names?

Yes, Timur the Lame, the 14th Century Turko-Mongol military leader, had a penchant for piling human heads into towers. But which medieval ruler of feudal times would measure up to our democratic standards of justice and the Rule of Law?

Going by that logic, nobody should be named Richard because Richard III, King of England (despite Shakespeare) was a throne-robber, who in his two years (1483–1485) had hacked off far too many heads — of friends, family, including children — without the vestiges of a trial.

Can anyone deny that Timur was the second greatest Asian ruler, after Ghenghiz Khan? By the way, did you know that Timur’s youngest son was called Shah Rukh? Should that also be an issue now?

Also read: Glad that Saif-Kareena named their son Taimur (it's not lame)