Naam karan is quick and it does one significant thing. The family brings the newborn to the gurdwara, Ardas is offered, the scripture is opened at random and the child is given a name beginning with the first letter of that hymn — and then Singh or Kaur is added. Those two surnames were given by Guru Gobind Singh in 1699 precisely to break the caste name, since in Punjab a surname is a caste marker and always has been. The awkward part is that a great many Sikhs now carry both: Singh as a middle name and Gill, Sidhu, Grewal, Bedi or Arora as a surname, which restores the exact information the reform was designed to delete. Diaspora Sikhs did it partly under immigration systems that could not handle a population sharing one surname, and partly for the ordinary reasons families keep family names. Sikh reformers raise it regularly. It has not changed.