'g', 'a', 'u', 'r', 'a', 'v'

International students always have a big problem in communicating the right pronunciation of their names. Specially this semester has been really bad. In past two weeks I have at least spelled out my name to ten different people and all the culprits have Americans.

When I first arrived and met my adviser he pronounced my name as 'Guraav'. This was interesting as it sounded something different. Soon most of the people of the lab started calling me 'Guraav'. But soon a week later it was the usual boring 'Gaurav'. But it was a pleasant surprise. Some different sound.

But this semester my teacher in Numerical Computations class has had a hard time pronouncing my name. So we communicate by spelling out my name letter by letter. So if I go to collect my homework, I tell her 'g', 'u','p', 't','a' or 'g', 'a', 'u', 'r', 'a', 'v'. She sometimes have a laugh about it. And so do I. Its something that never happened to me in India.

Americans are very casual about their names. Christopher becomes 'Chris', Thomas become 'Tom', Mathew becomes 'Matt'. Not that it something offending or bad, but its a real pain to the TAs who have to check the assignments. While the official entry is 'Christopher', they would write 'Chris' in their assignments. Its all very confusing and a time consuming affair to resolve the ambiguity.

Sometimes I do think, that why don't we assign numbers instead of numbers. Something like an SSN or passport number. Or something on the lines of the IDEA ad in India having Abhishek Bachchan. This a great IDEA. No more ambiguity of pronunciation and shorthands. Everybody has a number having universally known digits.

I have chosen a number for myself: 42023420