tamils and Vikings

Patronymics. It connects Tams with Vikings. It is the naming ritual that has caused me infinite misery and my father to have research papers credited to his name in refrigeration and MEMS optical property measurement apart from his own field of organic chemistry. Ja, I am talking about kids having their father's first name as their last name. Vikings followed that system. The Danish government outlawed it for more than a century (for reasons I don't know, but I think it was the terrible confusion). It did what I am thinking of doing. Freezing the last name at some stage and passing it onwards to your kids and grandkids.

I am seriously thinking of making chandrasekharan my family name for ever. It is long enough to confer it the seriousness of a last name (am not sure if ramesh can or will have the same effect). And it has enough alphabets in it to ensure that any kid I have will win the spelling bee before spelling their own last name right.

In the case of the Danes, it screwed up their naming as most kids in the 1820s had names Jensen, Hansen or Rasmussen with the curious byproduct that many successive heads of state totally unrelated to each other have had the same last name. Makes it easy for President Bush to remember the Danish head of state.

In my case, it will prevent any kids I might have from having to explain at age 6 to any dumbass teacher/government clerk/culturally insensitive moron that they do have a father (and know him) but they won't fill the "father's name" as that name is the same as the last name.My father never used a last name. He used his first name alone with a initial J for Jayaraman. I was to do the same. But I was bullied by a nice old Catholic teacher (she was the nicest teacher I had in all other respects) to fill something in my "last name". So at age 6, I did cave in and it has caused me the misery of never having papers credited to my name but to R. Chandrasekharan. So i have decided to end the chain of misery. The only thing i transfer down to future generations is the last name and my Y chromosome.