It seems that the names of Indian colleagues on LinkedIn like Sakthi S are almost always not from a desire to hide their full name, but because in South India it is approximately like that. Traditionally, there are no surnames in the European sense there. Instead, a father’s name initial is added to the personal name. So, “Sakthi S” most likely means Sakthi, son of someone like Selvam, Subramanian, or Sentil. In India itself, it is often written the other way around, with the initial first: “S. Sakthi”. Accordingly, D at the end would be a father’s name starting with D (Durai, Dinesh), A – for A (Arumugam, Anandan), etc. A daughter would have the same initial, and sometimes it changes to her husband’s initial after marriage.
A classic example is mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan: “Srinivasa” is his father’s name, not a surname, and at home he was simply called Ramanujan.
In Tamil Nadu, it’s also a deliberate stance— the Dravidian movement (Periyar) actively encouraged abandoning caste surnames because they immediately reveal caste affiliation. A father’s initial doesn’t reveal anything like that.
Interestingly, when you ask Gemini about this, it says its program isn’t designed for such tasks, that it doesn’t understand me and can’t respond, that it’s just a language model and doesn’t have such capabilities. Claude, on the other hand, responds alright.
The screenshot is just a random manager from LinkedIn.
