Anita Roy: My name is Anita Roy. A lot of people think it's a very ordinary English name because it sounds very ordinary and English, but it's actually got an interesting history, a very mixed history. When my parents decided to call me Anita they weren't sure whether they were going to stay in Calcutta, which is in India where my dad is from, or whether they were going to come back and live in England where my mom is from. They wanted to choose names for their kids which would travel easily whichever place they decided to live in.

Anita is actually an Indian name, and in Bengal, if one of my Indian relatives calls me they tend to call Onita, which is how it's pronounced in India, but in England, all my friends here call me Anita with a hard T.

It's a very, very common name for couples to choose for their kids if one of them is Indian and one of them is English because it really does travel very well.

In fact, when I got into school in England I was kind of horrified to find another Anita Roy in the same school whose dad was Indian and whose mom was English, just like mine. A lot of people think that Roy is a very English name too, but in fact, it's a very common Bengali name. Only in India when the British were ruling India, they found the name Roychodri very difficult to pronounce, so it got kind of shortened and anglicized to Roy. That's how I ended up with this incredibly common, but unique name.