Obama in London. (AFP)

Washington, May 25: After Diwali in the White House and first family dinners in an Indian restaurant in Washington, America’s President has now acquired an Indian nickname.

Chalak rhymes with Barack, the President’s first name, but Obama is unlikely to be pleased that the unflattering Hindi adjective is the moniker used by Scotland Yard to refer to him during his ongoing two-day visit to Britain.

The media from America to Australia was today abuzz with people of Indian origin everywhere offering their expertise on the meaning of chalak, a word commonly used in Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi and Bengali, among other Indian languages.

The Daily Beast, an American website which is noted for its opinion pieces, wrote a virtual treatise on the word which would please students of etymology.

One possible synonym in English for chalak is “smart”. Few people will disagree that the description fits the 44th US President.

Obama’s objection to being called chalak, though, will be the other interpretations of the word.

Britain’s national media which broke the story about Scotland Yard’s codename for Obama during his state visit quoted Indarjit Singh, director of the Network of Sikh Organisations in the UK, as saying that the word “is sometimes used when we want to denigrate someone who we think is too clever for their own good”.

Other synonyms in English ranged from “cheeky”, “crafty” and “cunning” even as a full flow of examples were offered to explain the meaning of the word which most Anglo-Saxons had never heard before.

Actor-turned-California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger who fathered a child out of wedlock and kept it a secret from his wife Maria Shriver of Kennedy lineage for a decade and Pakistanis who are pretending ignorance of Osama bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad have both been described as chalak in an opinion piece here by Asra Nomani, an Indian activist fighting for Muslim women’s rights in the US.

Scotland Yard, clearly nonplussed by what can only be properly described by another Hindi word, the hungama, over its codename told the British media that for secret words for security operations the agency relies on random choices by a computer.Yet, it is an example of how deeply South Asian culture has penetrated British society that Hindi and Urdu words are now in Scotland Yard’s secure computers along with European ones.

Of course, the codename for Obama has shades of French in its spelling and Scotland Yard used “Chalaque” instead of the more commonly used chalak. Like Kashmir becomes Cashmere when the reference is to wool from Pashmina goats in Ladakh in Jammu and Kashmir.

Till the time of writing, the Obama administration has offered no comments on the controversial moniker for their President, presumably because those who would take the call in the matter are travelling with Obama.

But at some point, the issue will elicit a reaction from the White House.With successive administrations here and the US Congress wooing India and Indian Americans, it would seem that an Indian nickname for the President is a natural progression of that process.

Diwali celebrations at the White House have now become a regular feature and an Indian restaurant close to the White House was a favourite of Bill and Hillary Clinton as well as daughter Chelsea when they were the first family here.

Unlike in Soctland Yard’s case, codenames have seldom triggered controversies in the US, but acronyms created out of code words have been hot potatoes. The original codename for the Iraq war that ousted Saddam Hussein was “Operation Iraqi Liberation”. But it was changed just before operation “shock and awe” for fear that its abbreviation, OIL, would feed into the criticism that the war was actually a US attempt to grab Iraq’s oil wealth.

In 2009, a police officer in Kerala got into trouble for referring to A.K. Antony as kullan or “short man” over the police wireless system during the defence minister’s visit to the state although it was not Antony’s security codename.