Now I at least partially know why I didn’t get the username that I wanted while signing up for my new Gmail account.

I knew for sure that ‘madhumita@gmail.com’ would have been taken. My parents did not choose a very unique name for me (though I thank them for at least not choosing a uniquely bizarre name either). I thought if I use a combination of my last name and first name, I would have a greater chance of securing the desired username. So I tried ‘madhumita.datta@gmail.com’. Nope! That was taken already. How about   ‘datta.madhumita@gmail.com’? Surprise! Surprise! That was taken too! I wondered exactly how many ‘Madhumita Datta’s grace this world?

Little did I know that less than a year from that moment of wonder, I would be chatting with another Madhumita Datta -- sitting on a sofa in the living room of a fellow Washingtonian, not far from my current home.

I am actively involved with the Washington Metropolitan Area chapter of the Jadavpur University Alumni Association. Sometime in December 2005, the President of the Alumni Association, Aniruddha Bhattacharya forwarded me an interesting email that he received, composed by (you guessed it) some ‘Madhumita Datta’. The email had a news article attached to it about a documentary film that was made by a Kolkata-based journalist Madhumita Datta, portraying the lives of some meritorious students from West Bengal who fought destitution and hardship of all kinds and still performed brilliantly in the statewide secondary examination. Aniruddhada was a little curious. I guess he just wanted to find out whether it was me who had the secret talent of documentary film making!  I assured him that it was not me. But by then I was a little curious myself. After all, journalism is my dream profession in my 'alternate life', and the discovery that there actually exists a journalist Madhumita Datta in my familiar corner of the globe had an interesting feeling to it.

The Alumni Association, jointly with the Youth Group of the local Bengali Cultural Association ‘Sanskriti’, communicated with the journalist Madhumita, and invited her to an informal gathering to talk about her documentary and related fund raising efforts to help the students during her trip to the Washington DC area in April, 2006. I was excited that I was finally going to meet my namesake. I googled ‘Madhumita Datta’ hoping to find out more about my namesake and her journalistic accomplishments. Alas! It turned out to be more of an ego trip with most of the top links pointing to the minor worldly details about yours truly.

Anyway, I showed up at the Rockville residence of the hosts Anjan and Gargi Guhathakurta with my seven month old son Gogol on tow on the balmy Spring evening of April 9. Aniruddhada and his wife Anjalidi were there. The kids of the Sanskriti Youth Group were arriving one by one with their parents. Then came Madhumita, the guest of honor for the evening, escorted by her local hosts.

The round of introduction began. As soon as I declared that I happen to be a Madhumita Datta too, to my utter delight, the journalist Madhumita disclosed a bevy of facts about me, all of them accurate! That I graduated from JadavpurUniversity, went on to do my Ph.D. at the University of Maryland, have a blog on Sulekha.com (where there was only a single six-month-old entry until this one), have an infant son who currently reigns supreme in my life...all these are public information now. Looks like somebody else went on an ego trip too! In a world pervaded by Internet, Milgram’s ‘six degrees of separation’ theory has a whole new meaning.

My son Gogol has his own story about his association with the word ‘namesake’. From the moment my husband Bikash chose the nickname ‘Gogol’ for our son (while Gogol was still in womb), he was destined to be entangled into the world of “Namesake”, craftily created by the Pulitzer Prize Winner writer Jhumpa Lahiri. Lahiri’s first novel “Namesake” talks about an Indian-American immigrant protagonist nicknamed Gogol. I have read the novel, Bikash hasn’t. Bikash firmly sticks to his claim that he had thought about the name Gogol based on his childhood memory of the adventures of little detective Gogol, a popular character created by Bangali literary icon Samaresh Basu. Every time a friend or colleague asks me whether we thought about naming our son ‘Gogol’ after reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, I dutifully explain, “No...that is not how we came up with the name. If anything, Jhumpa Lahiri, my husband, and me all grew up knowing the same Gogol in Samaresh Basu’s writing. Years later, Jhumpa christened her fictional character Gogol, and we christened our very real son Gogol”. In the course of this process I have realized how widely the novel has been read, specially when the other day the American wife of a French friend asked the same question! And now that the novel “Namesake” is being made into a mainstream English-language movie by acclaimed director Meera Nair, I am bracing myself to answer the ‘Gogol-Namesake-link’ question couple of thousands more times.

I read in the newspaper that Indian-American actor Kal Penn is playing Gogol in the movie. I am a little disappointed. Not that Kal Penn is a bad actor, but at one point Abhishek Bachchan was slated to play Gogol, and I am a big fan of Abhishek. I almost named my son Abhishek (I mean his formal name, not the nickname), until I decided to go with the name Jyotishko (once again, a name lifted from Bengali children’s literature). Six or less degrees of separation everywhere!

Oh, before I let you go, I just wanted to share with you that though I couldn’t secure ‘madhumita.datta@gmail.com’, I did plunge early enough to grab the email address ‘madhumita.datta@yahoo.com’. So feel free to send your comments at ‘madhumita.datta@yahoo.com’. Ciao.