What’s In A Name?

13 January 2010 13 Comments
Email This Post Email This Post Print This Post Print This Post
1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading ... Loading ...


Image of British Passport

I took the last step to change my surname today. Finally. No going back. And I feel kinda weird about it.

I have been using the married name slowly and gradually since I came to the UK. From strictly stating “I WILL NOT CHANGE MY SURNAME” to ” hmm yeah maybe in my medical forms – and purely so the baby will have your name”, it was a journey fraught with difficulties. What’s in a name, you ask. Well it is MINE. The one I was born with and here I am becoming something else.

It is okay for the men, who are Mr XY from the day they are born till forever after. Unlike us poor women, who have to suffer the collateral damage of getting married, as a friend once put it. Here we are, happy going through life as Miss AB and suddenly, in one fell swoop, everything about you is changed – right from what you call “home” to your flipping name! Not fair, is it?

And, being a Tamilian, I didn’t have a “surname” as such, just my dad’s name after mine. So it felt like I was letting go of my maternal home by ditching the pater’s name.

Well I whined variations of this theme for the past almost 9 years and The Spouse has become blase to it. It wasn’t as if I didn’t have the long-winded name tacked on to mine at all. I just didn’t get it done officially – in my passport, it still stated my name as my maiden name. And that was just fine.

Till today.

This morning, we took the first step towards finally embracing Britain as “ours” by applying for British citizenship and had gone to the National Checking Service to get our documents verified and our application passed through. It was all going swimmingly till the nice lady who was checking things turned to me and went “Would you like to change your name to your married name? It would be easiest to do it now” and started the old “should I? should I not?” argument again. Though she was quick to say “You don’t have to, you know – I just wanted to point out to you if you mean to get it done, now will be the easiest time. Afterwards it will mean more money and time”. Well, there she said the magic words “more money”. After having shelled out a whopping £1310 + £85 for the three of us, we were feeling slightly sick and I think I jumped at the words “MORE MONEY”.

So, I hummed and hawed and finally mumbled “Ok fine. Change it”.

There. Changed the most fundamental bit of me forever. For less than 30 pieces of silver.


13 Comments »

  • Doli said:

    :) oh it’s okay… that thirty pieces of silver bit was really funny :) u didn’t deceive anyone!

    # 13 January 2010 at 9:29 pm
  • Arvind Ashok said:

    why did you get a passport? seems pointless. oh wait, there’s still 20 years more of “I am moving back to India..”

    # 13 January 2010 at 9:53 pm
  • Lavanya (author) said:

    Poda!

    # 13 January 2010 at 10:01 pm
  • dipali said:

    What’s in a name? You will still be yourself, na.

    # 14 January 2010 at 8:13 am
  • Poppy said:

    Well you did what you wanted to, so I don’t see what the fuss is all about :-)

    So now you’re a british woman?

    # 17 January 2010 at 4:05 pm
  • Lavanya said:

    Poppy – Trust you to say something like “don’t see what the fuss is all about”!!! I did what I sorta wanted to. Oh well. Is done. sigh. And no babe, not a Brit yet. Just have applied for naturalization. Once that is thru, then I can apply for my passport. Have just started out on that, rather expensive, journey!

    # 17 January 2010 at 5:12 pm
  • apu said:

    What! What! You applied for the Brit passport? I thought that was one thing you were never going to do (a.k.a “I’m returning to India next year :) )

    # 19 January 2010 at 2:56 pm
  • Vinay said:

    This is a funny one.. I was laughing my bottom out.. Shylock kettan pooo !! Now, I wish I could convince my wife to do the same : (

    # 21 January 2010 at 2:55 am
  • sraikh said:

    I can see myself doing the same. I have kickass maiden surname and I told my spouse I am either keeping mine or adding his to mine but not getting rid of mine.

    # 17 February 2010 at 5:46 pm
  • Carolina said:

    Interesting post. When I got married my husband asked me to take his name and I told him I would, if he would take mine (this is possible in my country). Now we have our own “family name”. However, it was still hard to let go of having the name I was known for most of my life.

    # 5 March 2010 at 12:08 pm
  • Carmelina Shultis said:

    interesting take on the subject, count me as a new subscriber!

    # 31 March 2010 at 9:05 am
  • Clora Tu said:

    I love your take on this, could not agree more.

    # 31 March 2010 at 4:58 pm
  • Abigail Redhead said:

    Hi! I enjoy your site but I’m having issues getting it to render correctly in the Nautilus browser. You might want to recheck your stylesheets. True That! :)

    # 9 April 2010 at 10:35 pm

Leave your response!

Add your comment below, or trackback from your own site. You can also subscribe to these comments via RSS.

Be nice. Keep it clean. Stay on topic. No spam.

You can use these tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

This is a Gravatar-enabled weblog. To get your own globally-recognized-avatar, please register at Gravatar.