Athematic

A correction:
Eyeliner on kid: I guess that people put this black smudgy stuff on their kids called kajal. They think it keeps off the evil eye. It is a cultural thing, not a religious thing, because people across classes and creeds do it. What happens is this: if a lot of people pay attention to a kid, dote on him, pinch her cheeks, tousle the hair etc etc, say at a family function or something, this attention might attract the attention of the evil eye. And then bad things will happen, illness, injury or whatever. The black stuff wards it off. Presumably because the forces that would be raining down destruction upon the kid are distracted by the kid’s looking like a mini drag queen.

I just wanted to set the record straight on the three year old kid I was talking trash about a while back. Not eyeliner. Kajal.

At this point I have seen a lot of kids with this stuff on, not as eyeliner but as large dots on the face. I couldn’t figure out what it was, or why all these kids had large black spots drawn on them, but now, in my vast experience, I have connected the dots, so to speak. Kajal.

I don’t know if anyone has seen the movie or read the book “The Namesake,” (it is pretty good) but in the book some Indian parents who have moved to the US have a problem. They have to name their kid before they can leave the hospital with it. However, in India, people don’t normally name the kid right away, and they aren’t prepared, so the kid ends up with a legal name they aren’t happy with. I was excited to see this naming thing in action today. The wife of one of my GMAT students had twins last week. I asked what they had named the kids, and he gave a casual shrug. The kids don’t get named for 11 days here. The birth certificate just says “boy” and “girl.” Cool, huh? Then, the parents don’t name the kid, older family members do. And you don’t name kids after other family members; a person’s name is supposed to be just for them. Pious people will let a holy book open to a random page and close their eyes, then drop a finger down and whatever letter your finger hits is the first letter of the name. Some people have horoscopes drawn up to find out what the first letter of a kid’s name should be. A lot of people get named after Vishnu, the Hindu Preserver god. He has 1000 names, so you get a pretty wide selection. One of my GRE students from Seattle told me that using Sanskrit words was getting popular too. And the first name you get, the one you get when you are little, is your family name, or pet name: what people close to you call you. Then when you get older you get a rest-of-the-world name. Your outside name has to be chosen by the time you start school. When you enter school; that is the last time you get to change your name. Once it is entered there, that’s it. That is your name.

I don’t know how widespread this is, but in “The Namesake” the author talks about how the wife never calls her husband by name. It just isn’t done. She adopted a sort of phrase like “hey, are you listening?” to address him, so he would know she was talking to him. I enjoy that.