The Namesake(s)

April 9th, 2010  |  Published in Living, Personal, Projects  |  12 Comments

Being in a room with around 15 women, all called “Anita”, turned out to be quite a novel expe­ri­ence. Like we all joked, it was one occa­sion when we didn’t have to remem­ber any names!

This hap­pened in Feb­ru­ary 2010 dur­ing a trip to Delhi and Gur­gaon. A rather diverse bunch, brought together by Delhi based pho­tog­ra­pher Anita Khemka who is work­ing on a project called “Being Anita”.

I have never actu­ally thought much about my name. I have, on a hand­ful of occa­sions, won­dered about how it would be like to have an exotic name instead of the plain vanilla “Anita”. But over the years, I’ve got­ten used to it. Now, I quite like my name — I’ve made peace with it. And if you’ve noticed, the the trend of nam­ing girl babies as Anita has declined rapidly over the years. Which means, the name will be quite a rar­ity soon. The advan­tage is that it’s hard to shorten the name so I don’t have too many nick­names. At the very worst, it could be called “Ann” or “Annie” — nei­ther of which I like and thank­fully no one calls me by those names. I have a few peo­ple who call me by my sur­name, which I don’t like either. I actu­ally just pre­fer my name — it’s sim­ple, easy to pro­nounce and just…“plain”.

The other advan­tage is that when you’re trav­el­ling, you don’t have to make much of an effort to pro­nounce your name and spell it out so peo­ple can com­pre­hend it. It’s a name that seems to exist in many cul­tures and across geo­gra­phies. I have a friend who uses my name to book tables at restau­rants since her name is too exotic. So I’ve prob­a­bly been at many din­ners with­out actu­ally being there in person.

So com­ing back to my tryst with the “Ani­tas” — it was well worth the effort of mak­ing it to the Max­i­mum Store, our venue for the ren­dezvous — on a rather pleas­ant evening.

What I realised after the con­ver­sa­tions with these diverse women was the pas­sion that they had about what­ever it is that they’re into. I met Anita Bhar­gava, who’s a pas­sion­ate run­ner and is now equally pas­sion­ate about clean­ing Delhi in a day, the very artic­u­late Anita Tha­par Kath­palia of Fab India. Then there was Anita Vasude­van who wears many hats, includ­ing that of an entre­pre­neur and a writer. There was Anita Roy — British Indian — she had given up using a car many years ago and now gets around on her trusted steed — her bicycle!

An artist of repute, Anita Tre­han, Anita Lobo, an aspir­ing sports entre­pre­neur and Anita Nigam, an astrologer amongst many others!

Such inter­est­ing women — it’s no won­der that the evening flew by pretty quickly. Anita Khemka (who is doc­u­ment­ing all the Ani­tas through pho­tographs) shared some of her images in a slideshow and then we con­tin­ued with a round of intro­duc­tions over chai and snacks.

An evening well spent with my namesakes!

Responses

1. arundati says:
   

   April 9th, 2010 at 2:38 pm (#)

   how won­der­ful to meet so many name­sakes? must have been a fun evening.…

2. Mithun Ashok says:
   

   April 9th, 2010 at 5:22 pm (#)

   That’s a Nice Social Thought..
   Yahoo! it self has 20 odd Anita’s..
   Cool!

3. Mahesh Shantaram says:
   

   April 9th, 2010 at 6:02 pm (#)

   Anita Khemka is one of my favourite Indian pho­tog­ra­phers. I’d trust her to come up with a sim­ple yet bril­liant idea like this!

4. Yuva says:
   

   April 9th, 2010 at 8:50 pm (#)

   wow.. thatz an inter­est­ing gang..

5. Praveen says:
   

   April 10th, 2010 at 1:11 am (#)

   Hi Anita,
   I have been a lurker on your blog for a long time now. This one prompted me to com­ment though. Like Mahesh above said, this is a really sim­ple but great idea. Would love to meet my name­sakes some day. Not too many I reckon here in North Amer­ica. Oh wait, I might be wrong about that :D

   Kudos for main­tain­ing such a cool blog and more impor­tantly, keep­ing it so dynamic :)

6. sukanya says:
   

   April 10th, 2010 at 2:00 am (#)

   wow…such a fun and novel concept…does she have plans of doing some more using other names?

   would love to see the com­pi­la­tion and con­grat­u­la­tions to you for being a part of this elite group.

   BTW, we have a ‘com­mon’ friend..its a very small world indeed.

7. Ms.N says:
   

   April 16th, 2010 at 7:15 pm (#)

   i am amazed at the dif­fer­ent projects/things (for the lack of a bet­ter word) you seem to get involved with/invited to! :)

   def­i­nitely a novel idea.

8. Anita Lobo says:
   

   May 8th, 2010 at 8:42 pm (#)

   Hiya Name­sake!
   I’ve been mean­der­ing for a while and just landed on this post.
   What a won­der­ful recap of a novel evening.
   Thanks much!
   And off I go again.
   Cheers,
   Anita Lobo

9. Ashwaty says:
   

   May 9th, 2010 at 2:38 am (#)

   Hey Anita,

   cool writ­ing and you are a born blog­ger I must say.

   btw, I am run­ning a por­tal for blog­gers.
   My Edition(www.myedition.co.in), a plat­form for pas­sion­ate blog­gers to blog, make friends and Earn. If you are inter­ested, do sign up and you can post the same con­tents over there and redi­rect to your blog/posts.

   Love to see you there…

10. Anita trehan says:
    

    May 14th, 2010 at 5:32 pm (#)

    It was such a won­der­ful expe­ri­ence to meet Anita’s from dif­fer­ent fields and the credit goes to Anita khemka that she came up with such a unique and won­der­ful idea.

11. Anita Bhargava says:
    

    June 21st, 2010 at 8:09 pm (#)

    It was won­der­ful meet­ing up with you and all the other Ani­tas! We were quite an inter­est­ing and var­ied bunch:) May see you at the Ban­ga­lore Ultra

12. malvika says:
    

    November 19th, 2010 at 6:46 pm (#)

    whoa. ran­dom con­cept. queerly fun.

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