Silicon!
I was watching the season premiere of HBO’s Silicon Valley the other night, and it occurred to me that the main characters *might* be named in tribute to rock stars (as befits the show’s view of some SV software developers’ roles in the world today).
But my theory has some holes, so I am looking for help either filling it or killing it.
I feel like I am on possibly-solid ground with these two:
Richard Hendriks – Hendrix, duh – someone with the potential to change the game entirely
Donald “Jared” Dunn – Donald “Duck” Dunn
This one is dodgier, and may speak to my own biases (though somewhat like the character, this one would definitely be “minor-leagues”, compared to the first two):
Erlich Bachman – Eric Bachmann
But I’ve got nothing for these two:
Bertram Gilfoyle
Dinesh Chugtai
Any ideas? Am I crazy here?
Bertram Gilfoyle = Bob Geldof?Report
Maybe…in the other instances, it seems more like semi-homophony, not just initials (though – Bee Gees? hmmm.)
Plastic Bertrand?Report
To add, you could use Big Head (“Big Head” Todd).
Still, it seems a mighty stretch.Report
Well the other night was 4/20…..Report
It was yesterdayReport
@scarletnumber
“I was watching the season premiere of HBO’s Silicon Valley the other night”
I know you like taking people down but please so some basic reading comprehension if you are going to be an elementary-school bully about everything.Report
Dinesh Chugtai — Dave Clark. (There are five of them in the startup, right?)Report
Yeah, 5 if we don’t count that intern who walks through once in a while.
Interstingly, the name “Dinesh Chugtai” seems to be a mishmash as far as I can tell – “Chugtai” is plausibly a Pakistani/Muslim surname (the character claims Pakistani background), but “Dinesh” is more likely Indian/Hindu.
So either there’s a story there with his parents, or the showrunners are making a joke about how Americans can’t really tell the difference between Indian and Pakistani, or the character is lying about his origins?Report
Or the showrunners just picked a name from a namebank of “indian names”.
Since I haven’t watched the show, I can’t say how much of the “international audience” it was pitched to. (Heroes had a ton of pitching to the international audience — you didn’t get some of the meaning without understanding the Japanese…).Report
The character, like the actor, is Pakistani. There would be no reason for showrunners to “just pick” an Indian first name, would there?Report
I asked a Pakistani friend what he thought. It’s that whoever picked the name screwed up.Report
In all seriousness, what is the difference between Indian and Pakistani?
Obviously, I know that they are two different countries, but Pakistan was created by some British dude drawing a line down a map. And India is a country, but it’s also a country with sizable populations from about a dozen different religions and a couple of thousand ethno-linguistic groups.
Most Indians are Hindus and most Pakistanis are Muslim, but the Muslim population of India is still enough to make it the country with the third largest population of Muslims in the world, right behind Pakistan.Report
j r, if you want to start a nuclear war, just go to the gay bar like everyone else does.Report
True, but when I was devouring UK rock magazines in my yute, I was bewildered by all the class/religion baggage embedded in British names. Liam and Noel on one side of a great divide separating them from Damon and Bryan. Ask a certain kind of Englishwoman if her name is Catherine with a C or Katherine with a K and you’ll get a lecture about how only insufferable snobs/inbred yokels would name their kid any other way. Is there anything similar with us US of Americans? We really are two countries separated by a common language.Report
Obviously I’m not totally versed in all the intricacies of India-Pakistan history, culture and relations, it was just something I noticed when I googled the character’s first and last names looking for clues to fit my theory. You are of course correct that all kinds of cross-cultural currents occur, there, here and everywhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ismat_Chughtai
I just thought it might be funny if the show was having us on, either in a ‘meta’ sense*, or because for example we are going to later find out the character is really from some other background and just made up a superficially-to-Americans “plausible” name and claimed Pakistani background to get a leg up in the business; or we’ll see that his parents are like the Costanzas, except with regional conflicts over the dinner table.
* Hilariously, a Salon TV writer (ex-AVClub writer) who likes to view all shows largely through the lenses of racial/sexual/cultural politics, recently mixed up the actor (Kumail Nanjiani) with one from the Big Bang Theory (which I’ve never really watched, and am too lazy to google to see who it is).
When called on it, she hoisted her own petard higher when she apologized for conflating two different “Indian” guys (as I said, Nanjiani is Pakistani-American).Report
Nanjiani was great about the mixup, tweeting “I wish the bank made that mistake.’Report
And Richard Hendriks is the wholly unelectric not-a-ladies-man.Report
I think this is akin to seeing a face on the moon, there’s probably some forced pattern fitting involved here.Report