Archiving the “strange death of Europe,” as Douglas Murray put it, and the West more broadly, at the hands of the neoliberal technocracy.
Migrant experiences lifelong trauma from minor mispronunciations of her foreign name
Following in the grand intersectional feminist tradition of turning petty personal grievances into political crusades, here is some Indian migrant complaining that people in the West got her name wrong until then she went to India where they pronounced it correctly, and she felt affirmed for the first time in her life.
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Via The Guardian (emphasis added):
Like most children with “unconventional” names, I dreaded the first day of each school year. I would squirm in my chair as my new teacher worked their way through the class register, and my stomach would drop as they attempted to say my full name: Priti Ubhayakar. I would be sitting there thinking: “If the first name doesn’t get you, the last name will.”
In my hurry to get it over with, I would interrupt the teacher as they struggled – an attempt to save everyone from embarrassment. In primary school, most teachers and friends simply called me “pretty”.
I felt so ashamed of my name that I never thought to correct them. I hated it, mostly because I was teased. “Pretty? You’re not very pretty. Pretty ugly, I would say.”…
I would tremble when I walked into a room of new people. Knowing I would have to introduce myself, I wanted the ground to swallow me up. Over time, though, I came up with a strategy: I would stay quiet and let my American friends make the introductions for me. It worked like a charm.
The problem followed me throughout my time at university, every time I ordered at Starbucks, and even into corporate America. Over the years, I was variously referred to as “Perdy”, “Petri” and “Prit the Brit” (the last of which at least made me laugh).
I thought I would be stuck with this problem for the rest of my life, but then something remarkable happened. In 2004, after taking time to travel in the US and Europe, I found a job in Mumbai, India. On my first day, I walked into the office and, with my usual trepidation, stretched out my hand to introduce myself.
My boss shook my hand in welcome and said: “Hi, Priti.” She pronounced it perfectly, as it should be said: “Pree-thi”. I did a double-take. I had been fully prepared to go through my usual dance of nerves, and suddenly I didn’t have to.
From that moment, everywhere I turned in India, I would hear my name said the way my family had said it all my life. My name rolled off my tongue as I made reservations at restaurants. I breezily exchanged names with our local shopkeeper, who was always eager to address customers directly.
The sound of my own name was music to my ears. I let it ring out around me, providing a sense of comfort that I didn’t realise I had been missing.
During my time in India, I was surrounded by people who gave my name the respect that I had never given it myself. I didn’t have to be ashamed of the name my parents had given me with such affection. I could let go of the previously unshakable feeling that there was something wrong with my name – and, in turn, that there was something wrong with me.
To which I say: if traumatizing migrants by mispronouncing their names can get them to remigrate to India or wherever, I’m all for it.
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Does that make me a bad person?
Probably.
Can you imagine the terror this lady does/would rain down on her white subordinates if she were ever given a taste of power?
If I were unfortunate enough to have her as a coworker, having read this screed, I’d go out of my way to mispronounce her name every time I said it, with new creative manglings of it every time, just to torture her.
Does that also make me a bad person?
Probably.
When I was in kindergarten, my teacher called me “Bardy” — with a “D” instead of a “T” and a hard r, whereas the correct pronunciation is with the emphasis on the second syllable — every day for the entire school year.
Every single day when she called roll, she said, “Mr. Bardy.”
And every single day, I ignored the oversight because I didn’t care.
The kids also used to call me “Ben Gay” sometimes, after the ointment for athlete’s foot or whatever.
I didn’t care at all about that either.
What I didn’t do is stew over it, and certainly not for long enough to write an op-ed as an adult as some sort of Social Justice™ manifesto.
