What's in a name?

A whole heckuva LOT, if you had mine. 24 letters and 10 syllables, to be precise ;)

Hence, I have a whole series of nicks and fancy nicks and abbreviations and abridgments, self-endowed or otherwise. I’ve even kept some contributed by some very spiteful foes, and despite myself, I think they sound a tad better than the real ones .

Ironically enough, not until I moved to the land of strictly-ten-spaces-to-fit-your-name-on-the-tax-form, did I realize the perks of having a long name :)

In India - where the rule of christening follows the general principles of life, namely, make it as complex as humanly possible - names are made as long as the alphabet would allow, and then initialized. We even smugly expand on the initials -- for instance, K would be Kay and V would be Vee -- or shorten them to something fancier (for the uninitiated, abbreviation doesn’t require exalted levels in creativity cos they are usually a conglomeration of the choicest words, and you could pick between “good” and “pretty” and “loving” and “god”, and even among the million gods :)).

For a million bureaucratic reasons, my last name stuck on my passport and tagged along with me to Sam’s land, all 16 letters of it...

But not to worry -- like I adapted to the ‘specious yankee hello’ in my very innovative fashion ;), I’ve come up with some helpful solutions for those of you similarly plagued with that seemingly un-enunciable last name. Another important point of this piece, of course, is to educate the non-Indian and that occasional Indian who is blissfully unaware of the trials and tribulations of his long-named brethren (most often the one that gets away with the all-too-easy Das or Rao, which make even Smith look like a lot of work).

Believe me, there is no better conversation starter with a stranger than one that follows what I like to call the ‘moniker-stupefaction’. It certainly trumps the weather and it beats that Knicks-conversation hands down (yeah, they don’t just suck on the court).

“Oh my god, you have all the letters in there,” is the most common remark after squint-eyed perusal of your drivers license or credit card, your godiva martini or paycheck, momentarily forgotten. As for your response, you have many options, depending on the person, the situation and your own affability levels. If they seem to have too much time on their hands (almost always the bartender at your friendly neighborhood bar), you could proceed to explain to them which ones are actually amiss, provided you’re sober enough to recount A to Z. If they don’t seem to be particularly eager to extend the conversation (almost always the sales girl at that packed grocery store), simply – “Yeah, I get that a lot”, followed by the universal American suffix, the smile (I myself can manage a pretty decent half-grin :D).

Then there’s, “You must have had one hell of a hard time spelling that when you were little.” Here, you could go with the smartass, “Yeah, I almost sued my parents for child abuse” or take the more earnest route and tell them that you used initials, so you didn’t have to spell it out when you were 4 (my own little bit at educating Americans on the ways of the rest of the world).

The overenthusiastic salesperson requires the most work – “You have got to say this,” she says and the cheery glint in her eyes is hard to quench with curt denial. Uh-oh, allowing time for your own enunciation followed by a zillion failed attempts at hers, you can be sure your cappuccino will be a long time coming. Cursing your tough luck that you couldn’t jus dig up four bucks and save yourself 15 minutes, you try to be the sympathetic Samaritan and play along. After all, not being able to say your last name is her singular problem in life – “It’s actually not hard to say at all – just intone the syllables one by one. It’s not that much more complicated than say, Mississippi.” (It’s a good thing Americans are too polite to retort with, “That’s why it’s abbreviated to MS you doofus. We don’t usually have to say it.”) So, if you want my advice, the smarter citation would be Au Bon Pain. There seems to be a consensus on Au and bon but the jury is still out on pain – is it “pain” like it should be (owing in part to the awful coffee), “pen” or “paan”?

But you gotta give credit where it’s due -- for those that mercifully shorten gasoline to gas, spell sulphur with an f and humour without the u, and do away with complicated words like postpone, choosing to instead put it off, they try where it least matters. And I’ve successfully had about 5 of them say my multisyllablic, mellifluous, Dravidian last name...5 and counting...

I’m now wondering if my 8-letter, easy-to-intone first name is much too boring...I should probably rechristen to something more exciting. Hmmm, there’s a thought...