name – Pertinent Observations

The Comeback of Lakshmi

A few months back I stumbled upon this dataset of all voters registered in Bangalore. A quick scraping script followed by a run later, I had the names and addresses and voter IDs of all voters registered to vote in Bangalore in the state assembly elections held this way.

As you can imagine, this is a fantastic dataset on which we can do the proverbial “gymnastics”. To start with, I’m using it to analyse names in the city, something like what Hariba did with Delhi names. I’ll start by looking at the most common names, and by age.

Now, extracting first names from a dataset of mostly south indian names, since South Indians are quite likely to use initials, and place them before their given names (for example, when in India, I most commonly write my name as “S Karthik”). I decided to treat all words of length 1 or 2 as initials (thus missing out on the “Om”s), and assume that the first word in the name of length 3 or greater is the given name (again ignoring those who put their family names first, or those that have expanded initials in the voter set).

The most common male first name in Bangalore, not surprisingly, is Mohammed, borne by 1.5% of all male registered voters in the city. This is followed by Syed, Venkatesh, Ramesh and Suresh. You might be surprised that Manjunath doesn’t make the list. This is a quirk of the way I’ve analysed the data – I’ve taken spellings as given and not tried to group names by alternate spellings.

And as it happens, Manjunatha is in sixth place, while Manjunath is in 8th, and if we were to consider the two as the same name, they would comfortably outnumber the Mohammeds! So the “Uber driver Manjunath(a)” stereotype is fairly well-founded.

Coming to the women, the most common name is Lakshmi, with about 1.55% of all women registered to vote having that name. Lakshmi is closely followed by Manjula (1.5%), with Geetha, Lakshmamma and Jayamma coming some way behind (all less than 1%) but taking the next three spots.

Where it gets interesting is if we were to look at the most common first name by age – see these tables.

Among men, it’s interesting to note that among the younger age group (18-39, with exception of 35) and older age group (57+), Muslim names are the most common, while the intermediate range of 40-56 seeing Hindu names such as Venkatesh and Ramesh dominating (if we assume Manjunath and Manjunatha are the same, the combined name comes top in the entire 26-42 age group).

I find the pattern of most common women’s names more interesting. It is interesting to note that the -amma suffix seems to have been done away with over the years (suffixes will be analysed in a separate post), with Lakshmamma turning into Lakshmi, for example.

It is also interesting to note that for a long period of time (women currently aged 30-43), Lakshmi went out of fashion, with Manjula taking over as the most common name! And then the trend reversed, as we see that the most common name among 24-29 year old women in Lakshmi again! And that seems to have gone out of fashion once again, with “modern names” such as Divya, Kavya and Pooja taking over! Check out these graphs to see the trends.

(I’ve assumed Manjunath and Manjunatha are the same for this graph)

So what explains Manjunath and Manjula being so incredibly popular in a certain age range, but quickly falling away on both sides? Maybe there was a lot of fog (manju) over Bangalore for a few years? 😛

Nomenclature

One of the fundamental methods in which we humans understand the world around us is by means of classification, and one of the fundamental steps in classification is nomenclature. When we give an object (animate or inanimate) a name, we take a massive step towards understanding it and appreciating it. An entity without a name is extremely hard to fathom, and it can be argued that the lack of a name can turn something into a non-entity.

It is thus standard practice that when something is created, it be given a name. And this applies to fellow human beings as well – until a name is applied, a newborn Homo sapiens remains an “it” – almost a non-entity. With the application of a name, “it” becomes a person, and gets an identity of its own.

As we have been discovering over the last few months, finding a name for a t0-be-born baby is a non-trivial process. The number of considerations that must be taken into consideration is humongous, for this set of words is going to fundamentally determine how this to-be-born will be viewed by the world for the duration of its lifetime.

For starters, the name should sound pleasant, and should be reasonably easy to pronounce for most of the people the to-be-born will encounter during the course of its life. Second, the name in entirety should seem cohesive – think of all those names where some part of character is lost because first and last names somehow don’t “match”.

Then, while there might be an argument that the name is simply an identifier for the said entity, we should also take into consideration the meaning of the said collection of syllables. This meaning should be something aesthetically pleasing to both the parents, and (hopefully) to the to-be-born.

Some people go so far as to name their kids after certain qualities, either physical or otherwise, and then it becomes a lifelong (and sometimes futile) adventure of the said kids to simply live up to their names!

And then there is a separate set of factors that many might find trivial, but can nonetheless be important. One must consider, for example, the possible nicknames and diminutives that might stem from the name, and these (apart from the name itself) need to be palatable. Next, the name should be “contemporary”, so that the to-be-born’s name doesn’t look misplaced in terms of era.

Then, this is a possibly recent phenomenon, but there is the uniqueness factor. As one hostel T-shirt at IIT Madras in the early 2000s put it, “na bhUtO, na bhavishyati” – there should never have been one, and there should never be one other with the same name. And so people try to find names that are unique – but not so unique that it (the name) becomes a point of ridicule.

And then there are constraints on the language of origin of the name – in case it means something. And some people like to name their kids based on where they expect it to stand in class – this is one reason for the profusion of “Aa*”s in recent times.

Given that we know the gender of our child already, there is added pressure on us to come up with a name quickly – at least by the time she is born. With a name by the time of birth, she can start her life of an independently living Homo sapiens as a “person”, and won’t have to be an “it” for too long.

A friend with a two-year-old daughter recently remarked that “naming a girl shouldn’t be hard. So many abstract nouns in Sanskrit denoting qualities are female”. Another friend with a much younger daughter supplied us with “rejects” – names he had considered but ultimately didn’t use. Yet, it is of no avail, as we continue to be clueless in our nomenclature.

And it’s not just the first name that’s up for grabs – we need to decide what our daughter’s last name will be as well. The “default option” is to continue the patronymic (using father’s first name as last name), but the wife thinks “Karthik” makes for a lousy last name, so there is some debate on that front as well. Another option is to use my father’s given name (which is my last name) as my kid’s last name, but I find that simply weird.

Then there is the option of reviving the name of my ancestral village (which was part of my father’s name, but is not part of mine), but it sounds “too country” (translates to “village of cowherds”). Another option is to use the gotra (which is what the wife, or rather her parents, has used), but that will lend a casteist element to the name, which we’re not particularly comfortable with.

Yet another option is to dig into my paternal ancestry to look for suffixes that can be used as last names (this supplies “Rao”, “Shastri” and “Bhat” – and I know this because this is necessary information for performing death ceremonies), but that somehow that sounds too manufactured. Another common option is to use the place of birth, but “Bangalore” (where we expect our daughter to be born) just doesn’t sound right.

And all this is for the last name, which you might think must be straightforward! Imagine the amount of effort involved in coming up with the first name!

Whoever said nomenclature is an easy process!

Help me name my book!

The more perceptive of you here would’ve known by now that I’ve finished the manuscript of a book on Liquidity. Having finished the draft, and one basic round of editing, I’m now sending it around to publishers, hoping to strike a deal.

One of these publishers wrote to me saying that while she loves the chapters I’ve sent her (a small sample), she doesn’t like the name of the book. “Liquidity”, she says, is too bland and doesn’t reflect the contents of the book, and has asked me to come up with a better name.

And I’m at a loss, in terms of coming up with a name. I don’t even know what kind of name I should pick for the book. So I need you to help out!

The book is about liquidity, in the context of different markets. Apart from the handful of obligatory chapters (my chapters are mostly tiny, and there are 21 of them) on financial markets, I have stories on markets in taxis, dating, footballers, real estate, agriculture, job hunting, food, etc.

Here is part of an introduction to the book I’ve written, which might help you help me!

Why do people with specialised skills find it hard to switch jobs? Why do transfer fees for footballers always seem either too high or too low? Why are real estate brokers still in business despite the large number of online portals that have sought to replace them?

[….]

… we analyse why the market for romantic relationships, both matrimonial and dating, is mostly broken, and none of the new platforms are doing anything to fix it. We take a look at how taxi regulation is inherently inefficient thanks to liquidity issues, and how Uber’s much- maligned surge pricing algorithm helps create liquidity by means of superior information exchange. We will also see how liquidity helped build up the credit derivatives market, and then ultimately led to the global financial crisis.

So if you have any cool ideas on what to name the book, or at least a framework I need to follow to name it, please do let me know in the comments here! It might help you to know that the “acknowledgements” part of the book hasn’t been written yet!

The Explosion of Karthiks

Back when I was in LKG, I was one of 6 Karthiks in my class, and one of two “S Karthik”s. Two years later there was a reshuffle in sections, and there were now “only” 4 Karthiks in my class. The number varied over the years but it was a very rare class I sat in (IIT being one of them) where I was the only Karthik.

So it appears that Karthik is an exceedingly popular name. But why did it become so popular? We don’t know. When did it really become popular? That is a question we can now answer thanks to Anand C, who has put out data as part of what he calls the “Indian Names Database“.

Anand trawled through electoral rolls (available in PDF form), and extracted the names of all registered voters in Andhra Pradesh. For privacy reasons he’s not put out the full data (he checked on this “datameet” group if it’s okay to put but that group convinced him it would be a violation of privacy – I’m not so sure since said data is already public , so I hope he puts out the full data sometime). So what he’s done is to extract words from each name, and published how many people with that word in their names were born in each year.

So for example the dataset he has published says that there were 2000 people with “kumar” in their names born in 1955 (and on the current electoral rolls), and this number went up to 53000 in 1984. Thus, playing around with Anand’s dataset we can find out the relative popularity and unpopularity of names over the years.

So I decided to check with my own name. How many people named “Karthik” born in each year were now on the electoral rolls in Andhra Pradesh? Given the format in which Anand has put out the data, it was easy to find, and here is the graph:

So there were a few Karthiks right from the 1940s, but the number was low, and then for some reason the name suddenly became popular in the late 1970s, after which it grew exponentially.

And it DID grow exponentially – in the literal sense and not in the figurative sense that people use the term for any fast growth. I plotted the same data using a logarithmic scale on the y-axis, and this is what I found:

Notice how this plot is a straight line between the late 1970s and about 1990. So if the logarithm of the number of Karthiks born in each of these years is a straight line, then we can surely conclude that Karthiks grew exponentially in this period?

So what are the most popular words in Andhra names over the years? The top 20 all-time names based on Anand’s data are:

Draw your own conclusions!