On Thursday 17 Apr 2008 3:32:21 pm Deepa Mohan wrote: > My father's family had the automatic nomenclature process, where the > names Natesan and Viswanath kept alternating
This was true on my father's side but ended with my father's generation. However I was very nearly named after my grandfather - and I missed out only because the man kicked the bucket 2 days before I was born - and my name was forgotten in the aftermath of that. However I wonder if the reason for this silly tradition was something similar to what Suketu Mehta writes in "Maximum City" (thanks for the book Udhay) Mehta tells the story of a wedding tradition in which a cat is tied to a pillar during the ceremony and is somehow believed to be an essential custom. It turns out that the "custom" got started some generations earlier when a bothersome cat was caught in a wedding hall and ordered to be tied to a pillar for the duration of the ceremony so that the creature would not be wandering about. People who saw this thought it was part of the ritual and perpetuated it. I think that many of the absurd things followed by Hindus are exactly this. Nobody recalls why something is done but there is great fear in breaking tradition. There is a tradition in Karnataka in which the hosts at a meal approach every guest who is eating and tells him, "Nidhaanavaage oota maadi" - i.e "Eat slowly" This tradition has always irritated me. I like eating fast and can't imagine why anyone would try to make me "comfortable and welcome" by telling me to eat slowly. Nobody has ever been able to offer a credible explanation. I suspect the tradition dates from a time when underfed relatives from one's extended family from faraway towns would gobble up food hoping for a second helping, or perhaps they thought the meal was over before the people doing the serving brought the 9th and 10th of 20 courses. There was a tradition of serving a particular set of dishes during Diwali in my family which I have demolished. The preparations were not particularly appetizing; nobody had an explanation and one explanation I got recently was unconvincing. I have noticed that certain fearsome and overbearing ancestors have often made "traditions" to suit their tastes, and those traditions are carried on by the meek who have inherited, but are not blessed by the ability or desire to ask questions and demand rational answers. I am not a mindless tradition breaker. There are some customs with rational or elegant explanations, even if irrational. Anything outside of that gets to meet Mrs. Occam's darling son's cutting implement shiv (pun unintended)
