My house, My home, My kingdom

The tallest mansion of squatters!
One eye Jack is king in kingdom of blind

Growing up in RRF, we yearn to have regular addresses, not an address with block number, floor number and unit number. We were quite fed-up explaining to our schoolmates why there were so many dashes, hyphens and digits on our address instead of just the house number and road name. I suppose the stigma of living in a low cost high rise slump-like flats in the 70s was more the reason of the above. Even though living in the 21st century means condominium resort type of living is norm, we from RRF still find contentment living with our feet on the ground in landed properties!
Why am I writing this?
If you have access to people's addresses like I do, then you would have noticed that some addresses leaves no place for imagination on their social economic strata. Home addresses like 'Projek Perumahaan Rakyat', 'Projek Rumah Murah', Taman Bukit Mewah' will tell you how their home would look like.
Someone told me that many years ago, the mental facility in Kuching, Sarawak used to be called 'Rumah Sakit Orang Gila'! And Tampoi Psychiatric Hospital had been known as wad 'Orang Sakit Otak'.  When we grew up in Penang, anyone originating from Tanjong Rambutan was mental unless proven otherwise as the premier northern region Psychiatric Hospital was stationed there.
There is a place in Sabah called 'Menggatal'. Are the people ridiculed to be promiscuous, I wonder?
One cannot help it but over time certain names are acceptable by public may one day become hurtful or politically incorrect. Many years ago, children with Trisomy 21 (Down's Syndrome) used to called Mongols without batting anybody's eyelids. Ever since, Mongolia started being heard on CNN and started producing models, nobody called them Mongols anymore. Down's baby and special child they are!

Sins of my father, what's in a name?

So there was this nurse trying to call out a child's name to enter a doctor's surgery but she was rather confused. The name she was about to call out (Chezhian) sounds Chinese but the only child waiting was Indian. She rectifies the crisis only to be enlightened that it is indeed a Tamil name!

I wonder how many times this child will have to undergo this kind of embarrassing moments before he steps into adulthood immune to this type of queries.

Then there was another boy named Arhoaran (named after the victorious call of success in the name of Lord Muruga) - Looks pretty mind boggling for a non-Tamil to decipher. What about my sister's class mate name, Mangayakarasi, which her teachers found a torture to pronounce. They would drag the words trying to spell out the name in a sing-song fashion.
There was a boy I knew in childhood whose parents decided to name their child after the legendary Tamil king whose name was synonymous with fair, competent and just rule, King Pandyan. His classmates did not, however, appreciate the greatness of the boy's name. All they knew was that it rhymed with the Tamil word for pig and they had a field day ridiculing him!

Actor S.A. Asokan

Yours truly was also the brunt of joke when school kids ran out games to play.I was named after the great sorcerer of a king who embraced Buddhism after seeing much misery after his victory in Kalingga. Some old learned men used to say the word Asokan actually referred to Krishna (Yaso - Yasodha, Lord Krishna's mother, and Kan meaning eyes, essentially the eyes of the mother -something like apple of the eye!) In the late 60s and 70s, one of most prolific villain actors in the Tamil cinema was Asokan. As the fight sequences were very poorly choreographed in those days that the punch fell a mile from the face, the joke that use to go around was "What did M.G.R. say to Asokan?" The answer was "Dishyum, Dishyum!" In previous post long ago, you read what those darn kids use to call me!
In Kota Bharu, one of my colleague had a friend whose name was Mudah-Mudah. In the 60s, literacy level was quite low especially in rural Kelantan. Registration of home births were usually made in police stations and the names were spelt out and written out by the friendly country policeman. People familiar with the Kelantanese dialect would know that 'Mudah-Mudah' means simple. And that was his father had told the policeman - Give my boy a simple name - not name him 'Mudah-Mudah'!
The same thing happened to a nurse I once knew. She used to walk around proudly displaying her name tag with the name 'Permaisuri' - Queen! Her name was meant to be Parameswari!
Anyway, a few years ago, the Malaysian National Registration Department had banned many names, including names like Karuppan (blackie, male) and Karupayi (blackie, female).

King Asoka the Great

Nowadays, besides giving a nice sounding name with a twist of modernity in it, parents also ensure other subtle requirements are met, i.e. horoscope as determined by time and date of birth and numerology. That leaves the child with extra consonants and vowels to seemingly simple names to please the believers of numerology. (Raju will be written as Raajooh, Ravi is Raaveei).
I think that the name is for others to call us out when they want to communicate with us or warn us on impending doom. Hence, living in a multi-cultural, multi-lingual society, we must ensure that our names are not so tongue twisting and mind boggling that people would just decide to call us "Dei!!!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDHdrFVUKDw