What's in a name..

If you ask me.... everything. Your name is your identity. It's how you will be known to the world. Now that it's been established unequivocally that your name is indeed a pretty big deal, consider the fact that you have absolutely no say in deciding your name. Invariably, your name is born before you are. And in the few cases its not, things are not much better. By the time you are in any kind of position to assess the impact of your name on your life, its too late. Case in point, "Pushkaraksh". Now who in their right mind would willingly have a name like that? unpronouncable, almost impossible to spell correctly and looks & sounds like a random collection of letters someone sneezed out. Worse still, no one quite seems to know what it means or stands for. I've lived with that name for 25 years and have still not been able to figure that out. I have lost count of the number of times I've been asked what my name stood for. And I always had trouble answering that question till i came up with a neat answer. Now anytime I'm asked the question, I just say, "It occurs in the Bhagwad Geeta", with reverence and that puts an instant end to any follow-up questions that the potential inquisitionists might have had.
At this point you might be tempted to ask, "So, you got a very unconventional name. What's the big deal?" ... allow me to explain.

• I've always been happy with people calling me just Pushkar, but for some reason people feel impelled to use my full name. I'd be ok with that too, if only they got it right. Over the years I've seen my name mutilated beyond recognition over and over again.... Pushkar-sh, Pushkar-ksh, Pushkar-esh, Pushkar-akash, Pushkar-sha ... the list goes on.
• Now to my name truncated to Pushkar. For some reason my friends always found it very amusing. Push being push, and "kar" the hindi equivalent of "do"... and they thought it the smartest thing in the world to call me "Pull-kar"... or pushing me and saying, "but thats what your name means, doesnt it?"... and when they got computer literate and learnt about the "stack" and push and pop in connotation with the stack, there was a new addition to the list of names I was called... "Pop-kar"

there's more such incidents, but i guess you get my drift. Having a good name is like winning the lottery. One in a million. For the rest of us, I guess we must just learn to live with our names and look at the bright side of it. In my case, if you google-search "Pushkaraksh", a handful of links get thrown up, all of which point to me.. Now that is something I can live with. And hey, things could always have been worse.... I could have been named "Gaylord Fokker" :) .. until later... cheers...