There's a girl I'll call Rani. She's in the seventh standard, happy in her own skin, the kind of child who makes friends easily and laughs out loud in class. One ordinary day she laughs the way she always does, and someone notices. A comment is passed — about how she looks, the way her face moves when she's amused. The next day Rani laughs again, and the same remark comes back. By the third time, something shifts. She presses her lips together. She holds the laugh in. And slowly, without anyone announcing it, Rani stops laughing in class altogether.

That is how fast confidence can be switched off. Not with one cruel act, but with a small, repeated comment that teaches a child her natural self is something to hide.

The names we hand out without thinking

Almost all of us have been called something we didn't choose. A name based on how we look rather than who we are. Short, fair, dark, thin, fat, the one with too much hair on the arms, the one whose face broke out — there is a label for everything, and we attach these labels casually, in the name of fun.

I'm not standing outside this. I did it too. For a long stretch of childhood I barely called my own brother by his name. To me he was 'bhains', 'bulldozer' — whatever stuck that week. We tell ourselves it's just how siblings talk, just how friends rib each other. And maybe in the moment it feels like affection. But affection and erosion can look the same from the outside while they do very different things on the inside.

Why a physical nickname lands so hard

When you name a person by their body, you do something specific: you reduce a whole human being to one feature, and then you make that feature the thing everyone remembers. The child stops hearing 'you' and starts hearing 'your nose', 'your weight', 'your skin'. That repetition becomes an inner voice. It doesn't leave when school ends.

Watch the body language of a child who is being teased and you'll see the confidence drain in real time. The shoulders round forward. The lip-press I mentioned — that small clamp of the mouth — appears when someone is holding back a reaction they've learned isn't safe to show. Eye contact drops. The laugh that used to be free becomes a quick, checked thing, gone before anyone can comment on it. These are not random movements. They are a body learning to make itself smaller.

The compliment that isn't one

Here's the part that catches people off guard. It isn't only the obviously mean names that do damage. Say I call someone 'chhota packet bada dhamaka' — small packet, big bang. It sounds playful, even flattering. But it's still a comment on their body, still a reminder that their size is the first thing I noticed and named. Even a 'nice' label puts a person's physical self on the table for everyone to discuss. The intention may be warm; the message received is the same: this is what defines you.

What I'd ask you to do instead

I'm offering this as my perspective, not a verdict. Just notice, this week, the names you hand out:

  • Do you call the people close to you by their actual names, or by some feature you've turned into a joke?
  • When you 'tease', watch their face — the lip-press, the dropped gaze, the laugh that doesn't fully arrive. The body answers honestly even when the words say 'it's fine'.
  • Ask yourself whether you'd want that same name following you into adulthood.

Rani's confidence didn't break in a storm. It dimmed in three small remarks. The good news is that it builds back the same gentle way — through being seen as a whole person and called by your own name. Tell me honestly: do you think it's ever really okay to name someone by their body? I'd like to know what you feel about it.