My latest article was for Newsweek. The byline was in the name of Shweta Mishra. The piece prior to that was for SaaSBOOMi and the byline is in the name of Shweta. If my Huffington Post articles were in the name of Shweta, those at Parentology went under the name of Shweta M.
These are some other names I go by:
Shweta .
Shweta X
Shweta B
Shweta Shilalekh
Shweta Shweta
The irony is none of these are my legal names. I go just by a single name – Shweta. No last name.
What started as Indian parents’ method of dealing with school admission rules has culminated into a question of identity more than 30 years later.
A high price to pay for not clearing school admission test.
This is a story best narrated from the beginning, and that’s where I am going to start.
Second time lucky
Delhi Public School (DPS) society was opening up a school in my city and my father, always conscious about our studies, decided that we, i.e. my brother and me, needed to get admission in that school. As is the norm, there was an admission test. My brother got through and I did not.
A couple of weeks later a second admission test was announced and that was where the whole story started.
The second admission test rules said that students who had appeared in the first one could not reappear. Now we all were in a fix. It was then that my father had a brilliant idea. Why not change your name, he suggested. Or must have suggested to my mother; I don’t remember anything about it. Except, I was happy that my last name of “Kumari” was dropped. It was a ridiculous last name appended to the names of all my sisters, and I had almost detested it.
So, for the admission I had a new name. And to be absolutely safe, in case the forms of applicants’ were compared, for the parent’s name column my mother’s name was put. I must give it to my father that he never thought twice about giving precedence to his wife if the need be. Not the typical male chauvinists I still see around me even decades later. Remember, I am talking about the late 1980s when terms like women emancipation and empowerment had not yet reached a tier-3 city in India, although women were working and my mother was one of them.
Eventually I got admission, and often wondered about why the school wanted to debar those who had failed the first time. Maybe they felt they would not be at par. Whatever the school’s issues might have been, I am sure they proved wrong when I passed both my 10th and 12th examinations with flying colours.
Though, much to the disappointment of my teachers and parents I could not clear any of the competitive examinations I was expected to. The stubborn self that I was, I decided to take admission in Delhi University rather than waiting out a year, preparing for the competitive exams and taking them again. I did take those examinations later but did not clear. I seem to have something with competitive exams’; I am yet to clear a single one of them!! At least I did not lose a year.
At Delhi University no one cared if I had a last name
The admission to Delhi University happened smoothly, without any problem with my single name. The only thing that I remember is having to confirm to the clerk, while submitting the form, that I used a single name, and that was that. Though, I had become aware that having a single name was not the norm, even if not an aberration.
Alas! How wrong I was in my perception. Because it’s only in the Northern part of India, especially the Hindi belt, that people have single names. The rest of India has people with middle names, last names, and more.
The three years I spent at the University passed without any incident related to my single name, but my tryst with University of Pune, my next academic stop, started with a fuss over not having at least a last name. Pay attention to my use of “at least,” because I was expected to have more!
At Pune University they wanted a middle name too
I went to Pune to complete my post graduation. Here I was a person with a single name, and the admissions clerk at the college required me to put in a middle name as well. I can still clearly visualise the look of incredulity on his face when I told him that I don’t use a last name. And of course I don’t have a middle name.
The poor chap must not have traveled to the northern part of India or met people from there because people in Northern India routinely have just a first name and a last name. Middle name, which is usually the father’s or husband’s name, is not at all the tradition.
Talking of traditions, as you go further south, you will have people with three or four names, as the names of their villages or ancestral places are to be appended as well. In fact, I believe South Indians’ first names are usually their family names and it’s only the last one that is their own. That’s true of at least most of the South Indians I have met.
As I was telling, the clerk at the college in Pune was hell bent on appending my family name and my father’s first name to my name. After many arguments, it suddenly struck me that I had all the documents in my single name and told him so.
I told him that if he wanted any legal document or marksheets in the name of Shweta Brahma Singh (yes, that was the name he wanted to give me!) I would not at all be able to provide. Thankfully that stumped him and this is an argument I still use to good effect.
But the problem of single name did not end there. By the time I finished my post-graduation, digitalisation was finding wider acceptance and the online world became an important part of our lives.
And that was when I started facing online resistance
Some websites would allow me to register with a single name but some would need a last name as well. So I resorted to various techniques.
My first resort was adding a dot or a blank. It worked because the software just checked that some keystroke had been made within the box; they didn’t read what was entered. It solved my problem just for a couple of years. And then the algorithms got smart and refused to accept any punctuation mark. It had to be at least a single letter.
So I repeated my first name in some places.
But soon the algorithms got even smarter. They threw up an error, saying first and last name must be distinct.
That’s how my Upwork profile identifies me as Shweta M. Why M, you will ask.
Husband’s last name anyone?
Well, when I got married I had the option of taking my husband’s name. But alas! I could not bring myself to do even that. Two reasons there.
As luck would have it, my sister-in-law shares her first name with me and she uses her last name as well. Now, people were already pointing out that we looked alike, talked alike, behaved alike and even sounded the same on the phone. May be that had something to do with both of us studying in the same college, same year. I was not about to give those people the satisfaction of saying that our names were also the same.
Imagine me being confused for my husband’s sister!!
To be honest, when I think about it 16 years later I think it was a childish decision but at that point of time it seemed the right thing to do for my indignant self!
Two, I always hated it when women changed their last names after marriage to take on their husband’s family name. I did not want to be the same one and had decided much before marriage that I would not be doing that.
Anything from B to X
Coming back to my struggle with filling online forms, for the websites I at least knew what I was filling up as the last name. The real googly proved to be the forms that I filled in hardcopy, like those for bank account opening, PAN card issuance, credit cards, etc. When the data entry executives were faced with the message that entering the last name was compulsory, they put in anything from B (for blank, I assume) to X.
Clearly, they had no guidelines on what to do when they encountered a single name.
Simply speaking, whatever caught their fancy. This has meant that when I try to pay for subscriptions to foreign courses or newsletters with my credit card, the payment doesn’t go through because the name doesn’t match with what I filled up for the websites form.
And the struggle continues
This month, when one of my clients had to cancel the digitally signed NDA because they had used Shweta Mishra whereas I pointed out that I don’t use a last name. The issue was resolved but a delay of three days ensued. At one point I got so frustrated with the to and fro that I felt like legally taking my husband’s last name. But when I realised the number of places I will have to make the changes, I just took a deep breath and continued writing.
