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Ha, TOO many people are wondering about my LJ name….

I have posted about this before; I detest the word “Aunty”. I know it is a nice innocuous and respectful term here in Bangalore, much like “madam” elsewhere…but…to me it has VERY negative associations. It conjures up, in my mind, a picture of this out-of-shape,malicious, prying gossip-monger, who wears a nightie throughout the day, and whose world is limited to her children, jewellery, sarees, and other forms of shopping, grocery or otherwise,..and the servants, let’s not forget that! So I do dislike being called Aunty. ( I also dislike the Tamizh appellation of Mami, for very much the same reason.)

This dislike is further reinforced by the fact that all younger people, when they use the word, use it in this same,  definitely negative, sense. (“Oh, look at that aunty over there!” – with reference to a young girl who is not well-groomed or dressed or who is too hidebound in her ideas.) One might as well be dead as be an aunty-fossil!

Of course I cannot get away from it altogether. To my child’s friends and to my friends’ children, the appellation has to–er– apply. But I got around this by asking my child’s friends to address me, not by my name plus aunty, but to use  the much more glamorous-sounding Italian name of de Ponti! (as in Sophia Loren’s husband, hee, hee, hee!)

And a few other things happened…my neighbour’s child, who grew up with us, always has called my spouse and me by our names; and it has become customary for his friends (he is now nearly 8) to do the same. So in our apartment building, too, I am used to the young children calling me by name, and I feel so comfortable with it because I know the affection with which they address me. Also, I have several neighbours/friends, ranging from 15 years younger than I am, to just a couple of years older than my daughter, who also address me by name.

And then, when I met and at the tiger census, they, too, resolutely refused to call us Aunty or Uncle, claiming  that we were not fossilized enough! I also joined the LJ community where people are more American about calling each other by name without having the Indian cultural feeling of disrespect if the name is used without a respect-tag like "aunty" or "akka" or something at the end. People like and  were undecided what to do for some time and then decided to go with my preference.