What’s with a namesake? A person with the same name will add to the confusion

There is something to be said for the arcane Indian practice of adding s/o or d/o (son or daughter of) to every name, or at least an ‘urf ’ (alias), given the vast chances of people having identical monikers in a nation of 1.3 billion.

Particularly as in some parts of India it is quite common for the same name to recur in every generation, that too without the western practice of adding a II or III after it to indicate successive holders of the name.

It is one thing for, say, Hollywood stars to be named after historical figures — like Jane Seymour or Anne Hathaway — but when contemporaries sport the same nonhistoric, even commonplace, handle, it can be confusing.

In the age of internet, name searches, especially, this preponderance of contemporary namesakes can lead to problems, as happened last week with the coincidental appointment of two Indian-Americans with the same name to two high-profile jobs practically at the same time.

Many media outlets tagged the wrong face to the name Raj Shah against their respective new jobs: deputy communications director in the Trump Administration and CEO of the Rockefeller Foundation.

And there is every likelihood that the two men are not the only Raj Shahs in the US, not to mention the rest of the world, nor the and most important ones either. Maybe ‘Republican’ and ‘Democrat’ tags would have done the trick