Identified by name

It was determined by popular consent that the year 2010 was the year of scams for India. As 2011 dawned, the innocent amongst us looked forward to a year without scams. In the first month itself we were hit with the news of the regulators issuing a caution notice on a group of companies who had already taken funds from the public. As I searched for the last report on my portfolio of investments, my son was reading the news and he reacted.

‘How silly and trusting can people be when they know the company is a scamster’ he fired his first salvo. ‘How can one predict a company to be a scamster unless one is an expert fortune teller and now that Paul the Otopus of Germany (who predicted World Cup football results with accuracy) is dead, I doubt if his replacement is yet found. I mocked him.

‘There is a correlation between the name and the promise of the company being a future scamster’ he threw his punch line. That froze me until I creaked open the doors of memory on the little used subject of statistics as I tried to understand the definition and aspects of correlation. After activating sufficient of my memory on the subject, I readied myself to counter him. ‘How can a name correlate with future action? Don’t you know Shakespeare’s line of Whats in a name? A rose would smell just as sweet.’ ‘But there is statistical proof of negative correlation’ he argued. I was aghast. ‘You mean if the name is positive, the character is negative? At this rate, all companies will be scamsters because who would himself call his own company something denoting bad?’

‘Nothing like that’ he explained, ‘the more effort to denote a honesty or dependability in a single name of the company, the more likely it is to start a scam.’ I pondered and started ticking off some recent names like Satyam (the truth) Sahara (the Dependable) …. Wow he had hit a point there. Now I started real frantic search for my portfolio not to see its value but to scan their names and their meaning. Now, all the astrologers of a particular branch who ask to put an extra character in the name especially of Bollywood industry members will have one more sector for their increased business – Corporate Naming. Perhaps you can expect them to be dressed in Dhoti and some apparels to denote holiness while soliciting applicants outside the Registrar of companies to help the helpless souls to name correctly their yet to be born companies to hide any aspects of future scams which may be foreseen by persons such as my son and me.