Visuwesh :emacs_sink: on Nostr: I've never thought deep about Tamil people's practice of keeping one's father's name ...

I've never thought deep about Tamil people's practice of keeping one's father's name as the initial/"last name." Although I found the practise of married women changing their initial to their husband's name jarring, and swore to change _my_ initial instead, I was mostly content with the status quo since it was much better than the alternative followed elsewhere in the country. [ The amount of times I get asked my "full name" to know my caste is truly appalling. ]

Today though, I find our convention as a whole plain distasteful. Given the scientific community uses the last name to refer to a person, I was under the impression that the name "Krishnamurthy" probably referred to a Tamil male scientist... only when I opened the cited paper did I realise the author is actually a woman with the "full" name "Sailaja Krishnamurthy." I suppose you can blame the global community at large (and the Indian govt) for not properly accommodating cases like ours where we frankly don't have a last name, but the fact that I was misled into confusing the gender of the scientist feels like a robbery: I would have failed to acknowledge (and been happy) about the work of a woman had I not downloaded the cited paper. I guess I am finally aware of how this practise screams of patriarchy. (On this note, I wonder if anyone talked about this in Neeya Naana?)