My name is Govind and I am not a Gaurav

Communication is fundamental. Agree? Yes.

To carry communication, language is a necessity. Agree? Of course.

A language is nothing if doesn’t have nouns. Agree? Sure, whatever.

Out of all nouns from any language the most intimate and innate are names. Agree? Sort of? Alright.

Someone great and dead said a long long (int) time back, the following:

“What is in a name?”

That someone too had a name that has outlived him, uplifted his work and turned his influence into a pandemia. No, I am not talking about Lord Voldemort.

Have you ever been called by a name which is not yours but has the same number of syllables, starts with the same alphabet and sounds nothing like your name? I have. Not once, not twice but at least a thousand times in my otherwise believable life. I am not crazy. If anything I am being modest.

To understand what lead me to write this->article on this->day, we need to back up a bit.

I was bright in school (don’t mind the tense). This would cause the teachers calling my name a frequent phenomenon and a cheerful one at that. Out of these one particular teacher was very supportive and encouraging. She almost put me on a pedestal, presenting me as an inspiration to others, using my name as a symbol of all that is good. But obviously she was not accurate in any estimation she had of me, not even my name. She called me Gaurav. I didn’t correct her as that seemed rude at the time. This little amusing discrepancy continued for four years. But it is okay isn’t it? Such things happen, someone confuses your name in their head and the wrong name gets stuck with you. The thing is she is not the only one to make the same mistake.

I have been called Gaurav by not one, not two but at least ten people in my otherwise believable life. And these are people I can safely say knew me well. Unlike the teacher, others were not in the habit of using this misnomer. Generally things would be going normally, I’d be myself and everyone else would be perfectly lucid when suddenly out of the blue, someone would say Gaurav. And just then I’d say to myself: It happened again.

The culprits of this harmless crime range from friends, acquaintances, teachers and relatives. Such variety of criminals is strange but what’s even stranger is the consistency of the crime i.e. the constant (char * misnomer = ) “Gaurav”. I don’t understand why is it always Gaurav? Curious.

Signing off,

“You know who” Sharma.