Whats in a name?....

A week of making phone calls, making appointments, cancelling some, verifying some charges, creating some new accounts…, all of which got me to the familiar ordeal…

Voice on the other end of the phone: May I have your full name
Me: It is PR……., Should I spell that out for you…
Voice..: (sounding particularly tired and annoyed at the length of it ..) : yes Please …
Me: P as in Paul, R as in……, (thinking: With 19 letters in my full name, it’s a total alphabet soup…My parents could have taught me ABCD with just this….)

I empathize with the “Anan”’s of the world (the Narayanan’s if you don’t know what I mean)….because I too have the a’s generously spilt around in my name and frequently hear the other person..”Ohhhh..thats another ‘a’.., I thought u were just repeating the first one..”

Duh !!…She spaced out before I could complete spelling out my name…

Is it because Indian kids are exposed to these long names that they are good at spelling bee…

Nevertheless moving on, I married someone who could understand my plight…as he battled not only with a long surname but had a middle name too…And u guessed it right…he knew the plight of an “anan”…

How many folks have their last name truncated by expedia bcos of a word limit on the field…

When my parents decided to christen me with a Sanskrit name, they prided themselves for their meaningful pick. The journey, then on has been interesting…

Despite not being a totally uncommon name, I have never personally known someone with the same name. Through school, my friends caught on to the ‘vada’ in my name …due to their fondness for the south indian savoury delight, my name transformed with dahi and sambhar to their taste. An extra ‘h’ would have saved my name from that, but my dear mother preferred to hold on to the grammatical correctness of “it’s the first dha, not the second, and that singularly would transform the meaning of my name from ‘one who speaks with affection’ to ‘one who kills with affection’ ”..Hence in the greater interest, the ‘h’ was never inserted.

Undergrad saw some Profs struggle with my name and me standing up waiting for them to finish reading it, whilst being a curious exhibit fielding stares from fellow classmates. Relief crept in finally when they ended their struggle and called me ‘37’ instead. My name definitely wasn’t he longest around. The struggle to an unfamiliar soul though was how to pronounce the M followed by VA without sounding like a kitten. I shortened my name in Grad school to save myself and others of the agony. But it didn’t end there …

I chose a Starbucks name after my coffee cup came out being marked “BIRA”..That day I christened myself Ria for the restaurant world.

My world is filled with news of newborns now and I notice that 6 letters seems to the longest a name can get….And given that limitation, the names tend to repeat more often. Theres only so much you can do to get a meaningful name that’s not way too common within 6 letters.

And I am thinking, as names get shorter and shorter…we may end up with abbreviations for names, or will we get as tired as the guy who named a road Zzyzx on the way to Vegas.