There's a lot in a name in India, where the christening of a newborn is a massive occasion. Families are known to carefully choose their child's name, sometimes even taking into account the alignment of stars and other extra-terrestrial happenings.
In such a sensitive milieu, A-list celebrity couple Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor — he hails from the royal family of Pataudi in northern India, and she belongs to the oldest and most illustrious family of Indian cinema — came under heavy social media fire over the name they chose for their newborn son, Taimur.
The hashtag #Taimur trended on Twitter all of Wednesday and generated more than 3 million impressions. Still counting.
Taimur, born on Dec. 20 in Mumbai, shares his name with a barbaric figure from medieval history, and Indians lashed out at his Oxford-educated father for his perceived carelessness.
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Taimur Lang, or Tamerlane, was the founder of the Timurid Empire in 14th century Persia and he continues to live in Indian folklore as a true-blue villain. He, of Turkish-Mongol ancestry, had invaded the country in 1398 and brought down the Delhi Sultanate. Various historians believe that his military campaigns across Islamic empires in India, Persia, Syria and Ottoman Turkey, led to the slaughter of 17 million people, amounting to nearly 5 percent of the world population.
Taimur is also known to have beheaded his mother at the age of 18.
Much of the criticism came from India’s right-wing commentators whose disgust seemed to stem from the fact that Taimur Ali Khan Pataudi’s parents, Khan and Kapoor, had an inter-religious marriage, still considered an aberration in this part of the world.
And they tweeted out a list of Taimur’s atrocities to remind the couple of their supposed faux pas.
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Meanwhile, the couple’s relative and veteran Indian actor Rishi Kapoor, slammed the Twitterati for their relentless outrage over the name.
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Popular Indian politician Omar Abdullah seemed to concur.
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There were others who drew comparisons between Emperor Taimur and the Greek invader Alexander the Great, whom history remembers more flatteringly.
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Some tried to rationalize.
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And some went with sarcasm.
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And unsurprisingly, India's obsession with Bollywood celebrities continued its march to social media domination.
