What’s in a name?

I acted in cowardice and I am going public about the incident. Not a confession; it’s just that I am curious to know if others feel thi...

I acted in cowardice and I am going public about the incident. Not a confession; it’s just that I am curious to know if others feel this way, too. I had purchased a microwave oven. The company’s technician came over to instal it. He left saying he would get back in a couple of days with the free gifts that came with the buy.

Ten days later, I went over to the shop to report that the promise hadn’t been kept. ‘Do you remember the name of the person, Madam?’ the manager asked genially. I deliberated for a moment and replied that I was sorry but that my memory had failed me. That was a lie because I remembered enough to have given a clue. The technician had given a Muslim name and I withheld this information. I did so for the simple reason that the person I was talking to had a name badge that read ‘M.K. Hussein’. I feared that I could antagonise the decent fellow by bringing in the sectarian element.

A casual remark made by a Bengali friend, long back, came to mind. He said that whereas in Bengal one could easily joke about each other’s caste and fear no animosity, down south even the words Brahmin and non-Brahmin were treated in a guarded manner. ‘You people are not liberated enough yet,’ he said, ‘While we have come to accept one’s caste/religion as something that one got by the chance of birth, you people look upon it as though it were some fundamental difference. You may be carrying no prejudices but you are, all the same, hypersensitive to the variance!’

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I argued that it was decades of politicising the divisions and playing up one against the other that had eroded the minds of the commoner and made him unsure of his moves. The same argument, I realised held good in the present context, too.

This episode was linked, in mind, with a well-known story. The anecdote is variously attributed to the Buddha/ Adi Shankara/ or some guru or other. Two young disciples were at a riverbank getting ready to wade through the shallow waters and cross to the other side. At the bank was a young woman who too wanted to go over but was fearful of the water. Seeing her predicament, one of the disciples, with the lady’s consent, picked her up, walked across and put her down on the other side. The second disciple was aghast at this sacrilege and rushed to report it to the master. The guru listened attentively, then asked, ‘You say that he put down the lady at the bank long back. Why then are you still carrying her in your head?’

I long to be like the ‘other’ disciple, to move ahead with a clear mind. I long to be in that state of freedom, where the mind is without clutter and our actions and words come spontaneously from the heart. Into that heaven of normalcy, God, let the New Year rise.