What's in a name?

At a seminar in the capital last week, the high-profile panel featured the likes of former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, British-Indian economist and author Meghnad Desai and the Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan, or, as Singh insisted on calling him, 'Raghuraj Raman'. Not once, not twice, but at least five times during his seven-minute speech on the topic "India's growth trajectory in a fractured world economy", Singh called Rajan by that name, so much so that one wondered if it was a private joke between Rajan and the man who brought him back to India and gave him the most coveted job on Mint Road. Regular readers of the Chinese Whispers column will remember that Singh referred to Rajan by the same name last year at a book launch in Delhi.