MOVE AWAY MARY!

In many parts of the world,unique names are becoming popular

- ANJULY MATHAI

On June 6, 1944—otherwise known as D-Day— the biggest seaborne invasion in history took place in France’s Normandy, when the Allied forces retook it in an operation codenamed Neptune during World War II. The operation made Major General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who commanded it, an overnight sensation. He would go on to become the 34th president of the United States. Exactly 11 years after the D-Day in Normandy, another kind of D-Day was happening to a Christian couple thousands of miles away. On that day, unbeknownst to President Eisenhower, his namesake was born in Oonjapara, a small agricultural village in Kerala.

So how did a Malayali boy get named after the American president? Some might call it a tale with a twist. When he was studying in the first standard, the boy, who was baptised as Issac, would bawl during attendance because his teacher, Varkey saar, would not call out his name. Not that he himself was sure what his name was. As punishment, an older student was asked to carry Issac home every time he started crying. This, however, only raised the decibel level of his wails. Fed up with all the ruckus during roll call, the teacher finally asked Issac why he was crying. “Because you don’t call out my name,” he replied. Varkey saar immediately took corrective measures and put down Issac’s name in the first standard register as ‘Isenhower’, who was the most powerful man in the world then and who had visited India a few months before his namesake joined school. The name stuck. Little Isenhower had no problem with it. He thought it was the English version of what he was called at home—‘Ise kunju’.