White House is blooming with the cabinet of Indian Americans as US President-elect Joe Biden and US Vice President-elect Kamala Harris prepare the A-List for their tenure as Head of the State.
A few of the many Indian-American additions to the Presidential A-Team include Vivek Murthy, Gautam Raghavan, Vinay Reddy, Mala Adiga, Bharat Ramamurti, Celine Gounder, Neera Tandenand Atul Gawande. To date, about two dozen Indian names have been included for the innermost circle of the upcoming tenure of the POTUS.
These newest additions also came as blowback to the Republican Senator David Perdue’s mocking remarks about the new Vice President Kamala Harris’ name in a public rally in Macon before the elections.
The Senator mocking Kamala made jokes about the pronunciation of her name as he asked the crowd if it’s KAH’-mah-lah, Kah-MAH’-lah, or Kamala-mala-mala? The crowd at Macon majority being the outgoing President Donald Trump’s supporter burst into laughter.
These disgraceful remarks on a South Asian, specifically an Indian sparked a hashtag #Mynameis which spread like wildfire over Twitter in which the South Asians explained the meaning of their names so as to make the native Americans aware of their identities.
This hashtag grew to the trending category really soon as people started explaining that Murthy is ‘Moor-thee’ and not ‘Mirth-y’, that the second syllable in Gautam is ‘them’ as in ‘thump’ and not ‘team’ as in Tim-Tam and so on.
This Twitter war was to mangle the spectacle created by the Republican Senator. The new Vice president Kamala addressing the remarks by the Senator in Georgia before the election for both the seats which later turned out to be a record fundraiser of whooping $1.8 million explained the meaning of her name and gave the proper pronunciation for it.
She explained that Kamala means Lotus flower and in the Indian Culture signifies the lotus which flowers above the water but has its roots deeply and firmly held to the bottom. The new VP also made it clear that the name is Comma-like writing in her memoir, ‘The Truths We Hold’.
Political science professor and founder of AAPI Data Karthick Ramakrishnan emphasized the fact that Harris reflected on her relationship with her mother and even mentioned her relatives in India. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris explained the intention and significance of the Vice President-elect’s name. The name Kamala is one of the 108 names of Goddess Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, fortune, and prosperity in the Hindu mythological culture.
Another reason Kamala’s name being in the spotlight is that the US is no stranger to name change for becoming a part of the establishment. Name changing is part of cultural assimilation in Ellis Island which predecessor of the outgoing President Trump was no exception. Trump’s grandfather, the first of his family was originally named Friedrick Drumpf.
When Harris and President-elect Joe Biden take their oaths to lead America, they also herald the arrival of Indian-American success stories across a wide arc of subject matter expertise including economics, medicine, digital communications, and storytelling to the White House. The induction of about two dozen Indian names to the White House has set a new wave into motion which points the country pointing in a new direction, return to the roots in a foreign field!
