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I am not a fan of beauty pageants.
I have always found the phrase “beauty with brains” rather amusing.
Why should a woman have to put her beauty and body on display to get the door opened, and then prove that she has a brain once she is inside?
But Taanusiya Chetty’s recent second runner-up finish at Miss World caught my attention for a completely different reason.
Her name.
Back in 2018, when the then-18-year-old won Miss Grand Kuala Lumpur, she was Taanusiya Veerapandian.
Today, she is Taanusiya Chetty.
Why?
I don't know. And I am not suggesting that I do.
But it got me thinking about the names we choose and, more importantly, what we hope those names say about us.
In Indian society, surnames can carry layers of social information - Iyer, Iyengar, Reddy, Menon, Pillai, Naidu and so on. Some are associated with particular communities or caste groups; others reflect region, occupation, ancestry or historical titles.
A name, therefore, can be more than an identity. It can be a social signal.
And Malaysians understand this obsession with signals very well.
There's an interesting parallel with Syed and Syarifah. These are not merely surnames in the conventional sense. They can indicate claimed lineage, traditionally referring to descent from the Prophet Muhammad through his family. In Malaysia and elsewhere in the Malay-Muslim world, they can therefore carry considerable social and religious significance.
In other words, a name can tell people something about where you come from - or, at least, what people assume about where you come from.
Some people return from Mecca and suddenly insist that Haji or Hajjah be permanently attached to their names - as though the pilgrimage isn't quite complete until everybody knows about it.
Some receive a Datuk or Datin title and, almost overnight, their business cards, WhatsApp names and social media profiles acquire a shiny new prefix.
And then there are those who tweak their names to sound less “mamak”, less Indian, less kampung, more Malay, more English, more sophisticated - whatever version of themselves they think will be better received.
Names become branding.
Sometimes, they become social camouflage.
Again, I am not saying Taanusiya changed her surname for any of these reasons.
I am merely asking why are we so concerned about what class, community or social position other people think we belong to?
Shakespeare famously asked, “What's in a name?”
Quite a lot, apparently.
We inherit names. We change names. We add titles to names. We shorten them, lengthen them, anglicise them, modernise them and sometimes polish them until they sound more like the person we wish the world to see.
And perhaps that is the real joke.
We like to say that we don't judge people by their names.
Then we spend an extraordinary amount of effort choosing names that we hope will make people judge us differently.
So perhaps a rose would smell as sweet by any other name.
But would we still buy it if the label said Veerapandian instead of Chetty?
If you ask me, whatever name a beauty queen uses, I'm still not impressed.
Fa Abdul (fa.abdul.penang@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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