| Monday , February 2 , 2015 |
Know your Baracks & misters- ART OF NAME 'DROPPING' |
| Ananya Sengupta and Amit Roy |
 Obama and Modi record the Mann Ki Baat show in New Delhi. (PTI) The President referred to Modi nine times - thrice each as "Prime Minister", "Prime Minister Modi" and "Mr Prime Minister". But never as "Narendra". Which raises the question what you should do in case you run into the President of the United States one of these days. Should you call him "Mr President", "President", "President Obama", "Obama", "Barack", Yo, Barack!" or just "Bro"? Mr President (or Madam President, if Hillary Clinton does run for President in 2016 and make it) appears to be the safest choice. Not President Obama or Barack. "In direct address, a President is addressed as Mr President. His given name (first name) or surname is not used in his presence," according to Robert Hickey, the deputy director of The Protocol School of Washington and the author of Honour & Respect: the Official Guide to Names, Titles and Forms of Address. A clarification here: Prime Minister Modi did not address the US President as "Barack" too many times in public. In private, how they addressed each other is not known. Modi referred to Obama in the third person as "Barack" at least thrice at Hyderabad House on January 25 and 21 times on the radio broadcast on January 27. At least four times during the radio chat, Modi directly addressed Obama as "Barack", including "thank you, Barack" and "Barack, aap ke liye ek question hai (there's a question for you)". When the President is referred to in the third person, Hickey, the protocol consultant, recommends the use of "the President" or "the President of the US" if several heads of state are present.  Prime Minister David Cameron once said that President Barack Obama, who signs his name as BO, sometimes “calls me ‘Bro’” "Public interactions between chiefs of state, heads of government are formal, official and ceremonial. They are not personal interactions. Thus, during governmental interactions internationally, in public, it's always last names. There will be time behind closed doors when the cameras are turned off for less structured interactions," Hickey added. Do "address" and "reference" need to be differentiated? Yes, if you split hairs. Third-person references are not forms of address. For forms of address, there are rules, under which the President of the United States is called "Mr President". House styles followed by media illustrate the point. "Listen to a White House news conference, and all the reporters address him as Mr President," Hickey points out on his blog. But when the same journalists file the report, they refer to the President as "Barack Obama" or "President Obama" or "Mr Obama' or "Obama", depending on the house style. "Barack" is used in headlines to avoid repetition or when the topic is offbeat. ( The Telegraph does not use any honorific in news reports, unless it is used in a quotation.)  George W Bush was caught on the microphone at a summit calling out to Tony Blair: “Yo, Blair, what are you doing?” "Why 'Baracking' of Obama by Modi sounded off note? Because in Hindi, the first name, when used at leadership level, is accompanied by 'ji' or 'sahib'," said former diplomat and strategic affairs expert K.C. Singh. Most Indian languages have at least one honorific equivalent to "ji". Obama didn't reciprocate the Indian Prime Minister's prefix-omitting enthusiasm at any public event, except while recalling a personal anecdote about Modi's sleeping schedule. "I will share one thing, and that is we compared how much sleep each of us is getting and it turns out that Modi is getting even less sleep than me...," Obama said. What kept Obama from reciprocating Modi's first-name familiarity? Gardiner Harris, a journalist with The New York Times, said it was perhaps in deference to Indian sensibility. "There is a greater attachment to formality in India than in the US. Also, I am guessing that Mr Obama is used to more formal interactions with world leaders and perhaps he was more comfortable calling Mr Modi with the honorific in place." Harris said it was highly "unusual" to call a head of state by his first name during official engagements. "Even Bobby (Robert) Kennedy, when his brother (John F. Kennedy) was the President, called him Mr President and not Jack. The fact is the honorific is used as a mark of respect for the office. In America, this formality indicates respect." A political analyst who requested anonymity said Modi's use of the first name came possibly from the belief that "it is the done thing in America". "Perhaps Modi believes in the American belief of easy familiarity more than the Americans themselves, who desist from such familiarity in public life." But Amit Prabhu, a political communications consultant, said: "I think there is just one message that the Indian Prime Minister tried to send. He wanted to show the world that he was friendly with the US President, despite the baggage of the past." While Harris didn't want to comment on the US President's determined refusal to take Modi's lead, another foreign journalist pointed out that Obama had broken away from formality during his April 2014 visit to Japan. "He had famously called Japanese PM Shinzo Abe by his first name, Shinzo, not in an official engagement but before an official lunch," the journalist recalled. When the Japanese honorific, the gender-neutral San, is dropped, it implies a high degree of intimacy. If Obama did not call Modi "Narendrabhai" in public, there is a bit of history. The suffix "bhai" denotes respect in this particular context but the literal translation - "brother" - had once sucked Obama into a cultural debate. British Prime Minister David Cameron, speaking of his close relationship with Obama, had said: "Yes, he sometimes calls me 'Bro'." This is street slang for "brother", largely used by American blacks but adopted by whites to project their street cred. The Left-leaning Guardian newspaper of the UK did not think the word was necessarily flattering: "A 'bro' tends to signify an unapologetically obnoxious and casually misogynistic white male who hangs out with a homogeneous group of other bros." Obama was asked to explain if he indeed considered Cameron a "bro" when the British Prime Minister went to the White House in mid-January. "Put simply, David is a great friend," declared Obama. "He is one of my closest and most trusted partners in the world. On many of the most pressing challenges that we face we see the world the same way. Great Britain is our indispensable partner, and David has been personally an outstanding partner - and I thank you for your friendship." (For unexplained reasons, a Prime Minister is called "Prime Minister", not "Mr Prime Minister" as is the case with the President. The Queen will not call Cameron "Mr Prime Minister" but "Prime Minister". In that sense, Obama's reference to Modi as "Mr Prime Minister" might raise eyebrows in the tradition-bound parts of Britain.) Not that all Britons are sticklers for protocol. In January 2009, barely weeks after the 26/11 Mumbai massacre, David Miliband, the visiting British foreign secretary and a relative whippersnapper at 43, repeatedly called his then opposite number (and now President), not "Mr Mukherjee" but "Pranab".  David Miliband on a visit to Indian had addressed the then external affairs minister — and now President — Pranab Mukherjee by his first name and put an arm around him But Miliband put his arm around the Indian external affairs minister in an over-familiar manner, which was not appreciated. "He was totally tactless," was the immediate reaction from Arundhati Ghose, a former Indian ambassador to the UN. A former British ambassador told The Telegraph: "Those whose countries are on good terms, who see each other regularly (in the G8, G20, EU) will normally call each other by their first names -- and refer to each other by their first names when talking to similar colleagues." Rafael Correa, President of Ecuador, his Argentine counterpart Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Bolivian President Evo Morales are known to refer to each other by their first names on social networking sites. But intimacy can have its drawbacks. Tony Blair's decision to follow George W. Bush into war against Iraq in 2003 led to the British Prime Minister being taunted as the US President's "poodle" in sections of the British media. At a summit in St Petersburg in 2006, a microphone picked up Bush addressing the British Prime Minister: "Yo, Blair, what are you doing?" On his blog, Hickey offers a practical way to pick your way through the minefield: "I always say a person's name belongs to them, so the rest of us should address them as they want us to address them." But when it comes to matters of state, the best course is to stick to formality. Image consultant Dilip Cherian said some Americans had the tendency, when introduced, to ask to be called by their first names. "Maybe Obama had told Modi 'Call me Barack'. However, this is not to be taken seriously... it's their way of breaking the ice," Cherian added. Asked about the possibility that the President might have asked Modi to call him "Barack", Hickey said: "That could happen... but it's between them. The President of the United States is a person who enjoys informal interactions. So, I suspect that in private, he frequently changes the conversation to informal. But he is aware that when he travels, he represents more than just himself, and that calls for more formal behaviour." |