Deepalakshmi Ranganathan Iyer

Was that a mouthful for you to say?

Try it again.

If you the reader are not Indian, or not familiar with the word Iyer, would you have known that the title of this post is a person's name?  And that it is a female?

Now, try this for size: Julie Sahni.

You recognize Julie as a female name, right?

What if Deepalakshmi Ranganathan Iyer and Julie Sahni are one and the same person?

At the age of five, Julie Sahni began attending a school run by Arya Samaj, a Hindu reform movement, in the North Indian city of Kanpur. Classes there trained her to be a perfect housewife. Born in 1945 as Deepalakshmi Ranganathan Iyer, she learned how to knit, how to take care of a sick man, how to make dosas.

The essay about Julie Sahni is truly fascinating.

But, it leaves one question unanswered: When did Deepalakshmi change her name to Julie?

I gave up after a few minutes of searching.  The name change remains a mystery!

While she was the first Iyer to write a cookbook for the American and Western market, I remembered another Iyer--Raghavan--an accomplished and prize-winning author of cookbooks.

Thankfully, the chef-celebrity Padma Lakshmi doesn't carry the Iyer label.

And then there is the writer Pico Iyer, whose father was Raghavan Iyer.  No, Pico Iyer's father was not the cookbook author, but was a big time academic.

A few days ago, at a hotel, we spotted a Tesla with a personalized license plate:

For various reasons, I don't wear "Iyer" as a badge of honor and recognition.  But then I didn't re-invent myself as Sam Murphy either.  What's in a name, right?