Music composer Ramya Shankar laughs it off. Used to hearing her name get botched up often, she says, “It doesn’t really matter anymore. One of my closest friends gets it wrong every week.”
But not everyone can shake it off so easily.
“I don’t agree (that Indian names can be difficult to pronounce). They’ve learnt to say Chekovsky or a Jean Pierre and they are very different pronunciations from the typical English American names, so it’s really not that much of an ask,” says Karishma Rahman, a lifestyle blogger.
Another desi American, travel blogger Samia Rahman says, “I think for a really long time, immigrants put their head down and said ‘I’m fine with whatever way you pronounce it’. And I think it shows the power that you feel when you say ‘you know what, that’s not how my name is pronounced and this is the correct way to say it’. And doing that makes us feel like we’re finding our footing in this country and finding our power back.”
Many…
